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STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON ■ CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY ■ CALCUTTA 
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Pirates boarding a Man-of-war. 



STORIES OF THE SPANISH 
MAIN 



ADAPTED FROM 

FRANK R. STOCKTON'S " BUCCANEERS 

AND PIRATES OF OUR COAST" 



ILLUSTRATIONS BY 
GEORGE VARIAN AND B. WEST CLINEDINST 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
1913 

All rights reserved 




Copyright, 1897-1898, 
By THE CENTURY COMPANY. 

Copyright, 1898, 1913, 
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1913. 



Nottoooa Jitegg 

J. S. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



)CI.A347823 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. Pupils in Piracy 1 

II. Peter the Great 9 

III. The Story of a Pearl Pirate . . .19 

IV. The Surprising Adventures of Bartholemy 

Portuguez 30 

V. The Pirate who could not Swim . . .41 

VI. How Bartholemy rested Himself . . 54 

VII. A Pirate Author 61 

VIII. The Story of Roc, the Brazilian . . 69 

IX. A Pirate Potentate 91 

X. The Story of a High-minded Pirate . . 106 

XI. The Great Blackbeard comes upon the 

Stage 130 

XII. A True-hearted Sailor draws his Sword . 142 

XIII. A Greenhorn under the Black Flag . . 150 

XIV. Bonnet again to the Front . . . .159 
XV. The Battle of the Sand-bars ... 170 

XVI. The Story of Two Women Pirates . . 182 

XVII. The Pirate of the Buried Treasure . . 193 

XVIII. The Real Captain Kidd 214 



STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 



STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

CHAPTER I 
Pupils in Piracy 

AFTER the discoveries of Columbus, the Span- 
ish mind seems to have been filled with the 
idea that the whole undiscovered world, 
wherever it might be, belonged to Spain, and that 
no other nation had any right whatever to dis- 
cover anything on the other side of the Atlantic, or 
to make any use whatever of lands that had been 
discovered. In fact, the natives of the new coun- 
tries, and the inhabitants of all old countries except 
her own, were considered by Spain as possessing no 
rights whatever. If the natives refused to pay 
tribute, or to spend their days toiling for gold for 
their masters, or if vessels from England or France 
touched at one of their settlements for purposes 
of trade, it was all the same to the Spaniards; 
a war of attempted extermination was waged alike 



2 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

against the peaceful inhabitants of Hispaniola, now 
Hayti, 1 and upon the bearded and hardy seamen 
from Northern Europe. Under this treatment 
the natives weakened and gradually^ disappeared ; 
but the buccaneers became more and more numer- 
ous and powerful. 

The buccaneers were not unlike that class of men 
known in our western country as cowboys. Young 
fellows of good families from England and France 
often determined to embrace a life of adventure, 
and possibly profit, and sailed out to the West 
Indies to get gold and hides, and to fight Spaniards. 
Frequently they dropped their family names and 
assumed others more suitable to roving free- 
booters, and, like the bold young fellows who ride 
over our western plains, driving cattle and shoot- 
ing Indians, they adopted a style of dress free and 
easy, but probably not quite as picturesque, as 
that of the cowboy. They soon became a very 
rough set of fellows, in appearance as well as 
action, endeavoring in every way to let the people 
of the western world understand that they were 
absolutely free and independent of the manners 

1 See map. 



PUPILS IN PIRACY 3 

and customs, as well as of the laws, of their native 
countries. 

So well was this independence understood, that 
when the buccaneers became strong enough to 
inflict some serious injury upon the settlements in 
the West Indies, and the Spanish court remon- 
strated with Queen Elizabeth on account of what 
had been done by some of her subjects, she replied 
that she had nothing to do with these buccaneers, 
who, although they had been born in England, had 
ceased for the time to be her subjects, and the 
Spaniards must defend themselves against them 
just as if they were an independent nation. 

But it is impossible for men who have been 
brought up in civilized society, and who have been 
accustomed to obey laws, to rid themselves 
entirely of all ideas of propriety and morality, as 
soon as they begin a life of lawlessness. So it 
happened that many of the buccaneers could not 
divest themselves of the notions of good behavior 
to which they had been accustomed from youth. 
For instance, we are told of a captain of buc- 
caneers, who, landing at a settlement on a Sunday, 
took his crew to church. As it is not at all proba- 



4 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ble that any of the buccaneering vessels carried 
chaplains, opportunities of attending services 
must have been rare. This captain seems to have 
wished to show that pirates in church know what 
they ought to do just as well as other people; 
it was for this reason that, when one of his men be- 
haved himself in an improper and disorderly man- 
ner during the service, this proper-minded captain 
arose from his seat and shot the offender dead. 

There was a Frenchman of that period who must 
have been a warm-hearted philanthropist, because, 
having read accounts of the terrible atrocities of 
the Spaniards in the western lands, he determined 
to leave his home and his family, and become a 
buccaneer, in order that he might do what he 
could for the suffering natives in the Spanish pos- 
sessions. He entered into the great work which 
he had planned for himself with such enthusiasm 
and zeal, that in the course of time he came to be 
known as "The Exterminator," and if there had 
been more people of his philanthropic turn of mind, 
there would soon have been no inhabitants what- 
ever upon the islands from which the Spaniards 
had driven out the Indians. 



PUPILS IN PIRACY 5 

There was another person of that day, — also a 
Frenchman, — who became deeply involved in 
debt in his own country, and, feeling that the 
principles of honor forbade him to live upon and 
enjoy what was really the property of others, he 
made up his mind to sail across the Atlantic, and 
become a buccaneer. He hoped that if he should 
be successful in his new profession, and should be 
enabled to rob Spaniards for a term of years, he 
could return to France, pay off all his debts, and 
afterward live the life of a man of honor and 
respectability. 

Other ideas which the buccaneers brought with 
them from their native countries soon showed 
themselves when these daring sailors began their 
lives as regular pirates ; among these, the idea of 
organization was very prominent. Of course it 
was hard to get a number of free and untram- 
melled 1 crews to unite and obey the commands of 
a few officers. But in time the buccaneers had 
recognized leaders, and laws were made for con- 
certed action. In consequence of this the buc- 
caneers became a formidable body of men, some- 

1 Untrammelled, uncontrolled. 



6 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

times superior to the Spanish naval and military 
forces. 

It must be remembered that the buccaneers 
lived in a very peculiar age. So far as the history 
of America is concerned, it might be called the age 
of blood and gold. In the newly discovered coun- 
tries there were no laws which European nations or 
individuals cared to observe. In the West Indies 
and the adjacent mainlands there were gold and 
silver, and there were also valuable products of 
other kinds, and when the Spaniards sailed to their 
part of the new world, these treasures were the 
things for which they came. The natives were 
weak and not able to defend themselves. All the 
Spaniards had to do was to take what they could 
find, and when they could not find enough they 
made the poor Indians find it for them. Here 
was a part of the world, and an age of the world, 
wherein it was the custom for men to do what they 
pleased, provided they felt themselves strong 
enough, and it was not to be supposed that any 
one European nation could expect a monopoly x of 
this state of mind. 

1 Monopoly, sole ownership. 



PUPILS IN PIRACY 7 

Therefore it was that while the Spaniards robbed 
and ruined the natives of the lands which they 
discovered, the English, French, and Dutch 
buccaneers robbed the robbers. Great vessels 
were sent out from Spain, carrying nothing in the 
way of merchandise to America, but returning with 
all the precious metals and valuable products 
of the newly discovered regions, which could in 
any way be taken from the unfortunate natives. 
The gold mines of the new world had long been 
worked, and yielded handsome revenues, but the 
native method of operating them did not satisfy 
the Spaniards, who forced the poor Indians to 
labor incessantly at the difficult task of digging 
out the precious metals, until many of them died 
under the cruel oppression. Sometimes the 
Indians were kept six months under ground, 
working in the mines; and at one time, when it 
was found that the natives had died off, or had 
fled from the neighborhood of some of the rich gold 
deposits, it was proposed to send to Africa and get 
a cargo of negroes to work the mines. 

Now it is easy to see that all this made buc- 
caneering a very tempting occupation. To cap- 



8 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ture a great treasure ship, after the Spaniards had 
been at so much trouble to load it, was a grand 
thing, according to the pirate's point of view, and 
although it often required reckless bravery and 
almost superhuman energy to accomplish the feats 
necessary in this dangerous vocation, these were 
qualities which were possessed by nearly all the 
sea-robbers of our coast; the stories of some of 
the most interesting of these wild and desperate 
fellows — men who did not combine piracy with 
discoveries and explorations, but who were out- 
and-out sea-robbers, and gained in that way all 
the reputation they ever possessed — will be told 
in subsequent chapters. 



CHAPTER II 
Peter the Great 

VERY prominent among the early regular 
buccaneers was a Frenchman who came to 
be called Peter the Great. This man 
seems to have been one of those adventurers who 
were not buccaneers in the earlier sense of the 
word (by which I mean they were not traders 
who touched at Spanish settlements to procure 
cattle and hides, and who were prepared to fight 
any Spaniards who might interfere with them), 
but they were men who came from Europe on 
purpose to prey upon Spanish possessions, whether 
on land or sea. Some of them made a rough 
sort of settlement on the island of Tortuga, and 
then it was that Peter the Great seems to have 
come into prominence. He gathered about him a 
body of adherents, 1 but although he had a great 
reputation as an individual pirate, it seems to have 

1 Adherents, followers. 
9 



10 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

been a good while before he achieved any success 
as a leader. 

The fortunes of Peter and his men must have 
been at a pretty low ebb when they found them- 
selves cruising in a large, canoe-shaped boat not 
far from the island of Hispaniola. 1 There were 
twenty-nine of them in all, and they were not able 
to procure a vessel suitable for their purpose. 
They had been a long time floating about in an 
aimless way, hoping to see some Spanish merchant- 
vessel which they might attack and possibly 
capture, but no such vessel appeared. Their 
provisions began to give out, the men were hungry, 
discontented, and grumbling. In fact, they were 
in almost as bad a condition as were the sailors of 
Columbus just before they discovered signs of 
land, after their long and weary voyage across the 
Atlantic. 

When Peter and his men were almost on the 
point of despair, they perceived, far away upon the 
still waters, a large ship. With a great jump, hope 
sprang up in the breast of every man. They 
seized the oars and pulled in the direction of the 

1 See map. 



PETER THE GREAT 11 

distant craft. But when they were near enough, 
they saw that the vessel was not a merchantman, 
probably piled with gold and treasure, but a man- 
of-war belonging to the Spanish fleet. In fact, 
it was the vessel of the vice-admiral. This was 
an astonishing and disheartening state of things. 
It was very much as if a lion, hearing the approach 
of probable prey, had sprung from the thicket 
where he had been concealed, and had beheld 
before him, not a fine, fat deer, but an immense 
and scrawny elephant. 

But the twenty-nine buccaneers in the crew 
were very hungry. They had not come out upon 
those waters to attack men-of-war, but, more than 
that, they had not come out to perish by hunger 
and thirst. There could be" no doubt that there 
was plenty to eat and to drink on that tall Spanish 
vessel, and if they could not get food and water 
they could not live more than a day or two longer. 

Under the circumstances it was not long before 
Peter the Great made up his mind that if his men 
would stand by him, he would endeavor to capture 
that Spanish war- vessel; when he put the ques- 
tion to his crew they all swore that they would 



VI STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

follow him and obey his orders as long as life was 
left in their bodies. To attack a vessel armed with 
cannon, and manned by a crew very much larger 
than their little party, seemed almost like throwing 
themselves upon certain death. But still, there 
was a chance that in some way they might get the 
better of the Spaniards; whereas, if they rowed 
away again into the solitudes of the ocean, they 
would give up all chance of saving themselves from 
death by starvation. Steadily, therefore, they 
pulled toward the Spanish vessel, and slowly — for 
there was but little wind — she approached them. 

The people in the man-of-war did not fail to per- 
ceive the little boat far out on the ocean, and some 
of them sent to the captain and reported the fact. 
The news, however, did not interest him, for he 
was engaged in playing cards in his cabin, and it 
was not until an hour afterward that he consented 
to come on deck and look out toward the boat 
which had been sighted, and which was now much 
nearer. 

Taking a good look at the boat, and perceiving 
that it was nothing more than a canoe, the captain 
laughed at the advice of some of his officers, who 



PETER THE GREAT 13 

thought it would be well to fire a few cannon-shot 
and sink the little craft. The captain thought it 
would be a useless proceeding. He did not know 
anything about the people in the boat, and he did 
not very much care, but he remarked that if they 
should come near enough, it might be a good thing 
to put out some tackle and haul them and their 
boat on deck, after which they might be examined 
and questioned whenever it should suit his conven- 
ience. Then he went down to his cards. 

If Peter the Great and his men could have been 
sure that by rowing alongside the Spanish vessel 
they would be quietly hauled on deck and examined, 
they would have been delighted at the opportu- 
nity. With cutlasses, 1 pistols, and knives, they 
were more than ready to demonstrate to the Span- 
iards what sort of fellows they were, and the 
captain would have found hungry pirates uncom- 
fortable persons to question. 

But it seemed to Peter and his crew a very diffi- 
cult thing indeed to get themselves on board the 
man-of-war, so they curbed their ardor and enthu- 
siasm, and waited until nightfall before approach- 

1 Cutlasses, short, heavy, curved swords. 



14 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ing nearer. As soon as it became dark enough they 
slowly and quietly paddled toward the great ship, 
which was now almost becalmed. There were no 
lights in the boat, and the people on the deck of 
the vessel saw and heard nothing on the dark 
waters around them. 

When they were very near the man-of-war, 
the captain of the buccaneers — according to the 
ancient accounts of this adventure — ordered his 
surgeon to bore a large hole in the bottom of their 
canoe. It is probable that this officer, with his 
saws and other surgical instruments, was expected 
to do carpenter work when there were no duties for 
him to perform in the regular line of his profession. 
At any rate, he went to work, and noiselessly 
bored the hole. 

This remarkable proceeding showed the des- 
perate character of these pirates. A great, almost 
impossible task was before them, and nothing but 
absolute recklessness could enable them to succeed. 
If his men should meet with strong opposition 
from the Spaniards in the proposed attack, and 
if any of them should become frightened and try 
to retreat to the boat, Peter knew that all would 



PETER THE GREAT 15 

be lost, and consequently he determined to make 
it impossible for any man to get away in that boat. 
If they could not conquer the Spanish vessel they 
must die on her decks. 

When the half -sunken canoe touched the sides 
of the vessel, the pirates, seizing every rope or pro- 
jection on which they could lay their hands, 
climbed up the sides of the man-of-war, as if they 
had been twenty-nine cats, and, springing over the 
rail, dashed upon the sailors who were on deck. 
These men were utterly stupefied and astounded. 
They had seen nothing, they had heard nothing, 
and all of a sudden they were confronted by 
savage fellows with cutlasses and pistols. 

Some of the crew looked over the sides to see 
where these strange visitors had come from, but 
they saw nothing, for the canoe had gone to the 
bottom. Then they were filled with a supersti- 
tious horror, believing that the wild visitors were 
devils who had dropped from the sky, for there 
seemed no other place from which they could come. 
Making no attempt to defend themselves, the 
sailors, wild with terror, tumbled below and hid 
themselves, without even giving an alarm. 



16 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

The Spanish captain was still playing cards, and 
whether he was winning or losing, the old historians 
do not tell us, but suddenly a newcomer took 
a hand in the game. This was Peter the Great, 
and he played the ace of trumps. With a great 
pistol in his hand, he called upon the Spanish cap- 
tain to surrender. That noble commander glanced 
around. There was a savage pirate holding a 
pistol at the head of each of the officers at the 
table. He threw up his cards. The trick was 
won by Peter and his men. 

The rest of the game was easy enough. When 
the pirates spread themselves over the vessel, the 
frightened crew got out of sight as well as they 
could. Some, who attempted to seize their arms 
in order to defend themselves, were ruthlessly cut 
down or shot, and when the hatches had been 
securely fastened upon the sailors who had fled 
below, Peter the Great was captain and owner of 
that tall Spanish man-of-war. 

It is quite certain that the first thing these 
pirates did to celebrate their victory was to eat a 
rousing good supper, and then they took charge of 
the vessel, and sailed her triumphantly over the 



PETER THE GREAT 17 

waters on which, not many hours before, they had 
feared that a little boat would soon be floating, 
filled with their emaciated * bodies. 

This most remarkable success of Peter the Great 
worked a great change, of course, in the circum- 
stances of himself and his men. But it worked 
a greater change in the career, and possibly in the 
character, of the captain. He was now a very rich 
man, and all his followers had plenty of money. 
The Spanish vessel was amply supplied with pro- 
visions, and there was also on board a great quan- 
tity of gold bullion, 2 which was to be shipped to 
Spain. In fact, Peter and his men had booty 
enough to satisfy any sensible pirate. Now we all 
know that sensible pirates, and people in any 
sphere of life who are satisfied when they have 
enough, are very rare indeed, and therefore it is not 
a little surprising that the bold buccaneer, whose 
story we are now telling, should have proved that 
he merited, in a certain way, the title his com- 
panions had given him. 

Sailing his prize to the shores of Hispaniola, 

1 Emaciated, very lean, wasted away. 

2 Bullion, gold or silver in bars, not coined. 



18 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Peter put on shore all the Spaniards whose services 
he did not desire. The rest of his prisoners he 
compelled to help his men work the ship, and then, 
without delay, he sailed away to France, and there 
he retired entirely from the business of piracy, 
and became a gentleman of wealth and leisure. 



CHAPTER III 
The Story of a Pearl Pirate 

THE ordinary story of the pirate, or the 
wicked man in general, no matter how 
successful he may have been in his criminal 
career, nearly always ends disastrously, and in that 
way points a moral which doubtless has a good 
effect on a large class of people, who would be very 
glad to do wrong, provided no harm was likely to 
come to them in consequence. But the story of 
Peter the Great, which we have just told, contains 
no such moral. In fact, its influence upon the 
adventurers of that period was most unwholesome. 
When the wonderful success of Peter the Great 
became known, the buccaneering community at 
Tortuga 1 was wildly, excited. Every bushy- 
bearded fellow who could get possession of a small 
boat, and induce a score of other bushy-bearded 
fellows to follow him, wanted to start out and 

1 See map. 
19 



20 STORIES. OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

capture a rich Spanish galleon, as the great ships, 
used alike for war and commerce, were then called. 

But not only were the French and English sailors 
and traders who had become buccaneers excited 
and stimulated by the remarkable good fortune of 
their companion, but many people of adventurous 
mind, who had never thought of leaving England 
for purposes of piracy, now became firmly con- 
vinced that there was no business which promised 
better than that of a buccaneer, and some of them 
crossed the ocean for the express purpose of getting 
rich by capturing Spanish vessels homeward 
bound. 

As there were not enough suitable vessels in 
Tortuga for the demands of the recently stimu- 
lated 1 industry, the buccaneer settlers went to 
other parts of the West Indies to obtain suitable 
craft, and it is related that in about a month after 
the great victory of Peter the Great, two large 
Spanish vessels, loaded with silver bullion, and 
two other heavily laden merchantmen were 
brought into Tortuga by the buccaneers. 

One of the adventurers who set out about this 

1 Stimulated, roused to new activity. 



THE STORY OF A PEARL PIRATE 21 

time on a cruise after gold-laden vessels, was a 
Frenchman who was known to his countrymen as 
Pierre Francois, and to the English as Peter 
Francis. He was a good sailor, and ready for any 
sort of a sea-fight, but for a long time he cruised 
about without seeing anything which it was worth 
while to attempt to capture. At last, when his 
provisions began to give out, and his men became 
somewhat discontented, Pierre made up his mind 
that, rather than return to Tortuga empty-handed, 
he would make a bold and novel stroke for fortune. 

At the mouth of one of the large rivers of the 
mainland the Spaniards had established a pearl fish- 
ery, — for there was no kind of wealth or treasure, 
on the land, under ground, or at the bottom of the 
sea, that the Spaniards did not get if it were possi- 
ble for them to do so. 

Every year, at the proper season, a dozen or 
more vessels came to this pearl-bank, attended by 
a man-of-war to protect them from molestation. 
Pierre knew all about this, and as he could not 
find any Spanish merchantmen to rob, he thought 
he would go down and see what he could do with 
the pearl-fishers. This was something the buc- 



22 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

caneers had not yet attempted, but no one knows 
what he can do until he tries, and it was very- 
necessary that this buccaneer captain should try 
something immediately. 

When he reached the coast near the mouth of 
the river, he took the masts out of his little vessel, 
and rowed quietly toward the pearl-fishing fleet, 
as if he had intended to join them on some entirely 
peaceable errand; and, in fact, there was no 
reason whatever why the Spaniards should suppose 
that a boat full of buccaneers should be rowing 
along that part of the coast. 

The pearl-fishing vessels were all at anchor, and 
the people on board were quietly attending to their 
business. Out at sea, some distance from the 
mouth of the river, the man-of-war was lying 
becalmed. The native divers who went down to 
the bottom of the sea to bring up the shellfish that 
contained the pearls, plunged into the water, and 
came up wet and shining in the sun, with no fear 
whatever of any sharks which might be swimming 
about in search of a dinner, and the people on 
the vessels opened the oysters and carefully 
searched for pearls, feeling as safe from harm as 



THE STORY OF A PEARL PIRATE 23 

if they were picking olives in their native 
groves. 

But something worse than a shark was quietly 
making its way over those tranquil waters, and no 
banditti who ever descended from Spanish moun- 
tains upon the quiet peasants of a village, equalled 
in ferocity the savage fellows who were crouching 
in the little boat belonging to Pierre of Tortuga. 

This innocent-looking craft, which the pearl- 
fishers probably thought was loaded with fruit or 
vegetables which somebody from the mainland 
desired to sell, was permitted, without being chal- 
lenged or interfered with, to row up alongside the 
largest vessel of the fleet, on which there were 
some armed men and a few cannon. 

As soon as Pierre's boat touched the Spanish 
vessel, the buccaneers sprang on board with their 
pistols and cutlasses, and a savage fight began. 
The Spaniards were surprised, but there were a 
great many more of them than there were pirates, 
and they fought hard. However, the man who 
makes the attack, and who is at the same time 
desperate and hungry, has a great advantage, and 
it was not long before the buccaneers were masters 



24 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

of the vessel. Those of the Spaniards who were 
not killed were forced into the service of their 
captors, and Pierre found himself in command of a 
very good vessel. 

Now it so happened that the man-of-war was so 
far away that she knew nothing of this fight on 
board one of the fleet which she was there to watch, 
and if she had known of it, she would not have been 
able to give any assistance, for there was no wind 
by which she could sail to the mouth of the river. 
Therefore, so far as she was concerned, Pierre con- 
sidered himself safe. 

But although he had captured a Spanish ship, he 
was not so foolish as to haul down her flag, and run 
up his own in her place. He had had very good 
success so far, but he was not satisfied. It was 
quite probable that there was a rich store of pearls 
on board the vessel he had taken, but on the other 
vessels of the fleet there were many more pearls, 
and these he wanted if he could get them. In fact, 
he conceived the grand idea of capturing the whole 
fleet. 

But it would be impossible for Pierre to attempt 
anything on such a magnificent scale until he had 



THE STORY OF A PEARL PIRATE 25 

first disposed of the man-of-war, and as he had now 
a good strong ship, with a much larger crew than 
that with which he had set out, — for the Spanish 
prisoners would be obliged to man the guns and 
help in every way to fight their countrymen, — 
Pierre determined to attack the man-of-war. 

A land wind began to blow, which enabled 
him to make very fair headway out to sea. The 
Spanish colors were flying from his topmast, and he 
hoped to be able, without being suspected of any 
evil designs, to get so near to the man-of-war that 
he might run alongside and boldly board her. 

But something now happened which Pierre could 
not have expected. When the commander of the 
war- vessel perceived that one of the fleet under his 
charge was leaving her companions and putting out 
to sea, he could imagine no reason for such extraor- 
dinary conduct, except that she was taking advan- 
tage of the fact that the wind had not yet reached 
his vessel, and was trying to run away with the 
pearls she had on board. From these ready sus- 
picions we may imagine that, at that time, the 
robbers who robbed robbers were not all bucca- 
neers. 



26 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Soon after the Spanish captain perceived that 
one of his fleet was making his way out of the river, 
the wind reached his vessel, and he immediately 
set all sail and started in pursuit of the rascals, 
whom he supposed to be his dishonest countrymen. 

The breeze freshened rapidly, and when Pierre 
and his men saw that the man-of-war was coming 
toward them at a good rate of speed, showing 
plainly that she had suspicions of them, they gave 
up all hope of running alongside of her and board- 
ing her, and concluded that the best thing they 
could do would be to give up their plan of capturing 
the pearl-fishing fleet, and get away with the ship 
they had taken, and whatever it had on board. So 
they set all sail, and there was a fine sea-chase. 

The now frightened buccaneers were too anxious 
to get away. They not only. put on all the sail 
that the vessel could carry, but they put on more. 
The wind blew harder, and suddenly down came 
the mainmast with a crash. This stopped the 
chase, and the next act in the performance would 
have to be a sea-fight. Pierre and his buccaneers 
were good at that sort of thing, and when the man- 
of-war came up, there was a terrible time on board 



THE STORY OF A PEARL PIRATE 27 




They set Sail and there was a fine Sea-chase. 



28 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

those two vessels. But the Spaniards were the 
stronger, and the buccaneers were defeated. 

There must have been something in the daring 
courage of this Frenchman and his little band of 
followers which gave him favor in the eyes of the 
Spanish captain, for there was no other reason for 
the good treatment which the buccaneers received. 

They were not put to the sword nor thrown 
overboard, nor sent on shore and made to work as 
slaves, — three very common methods of treating 
prisoners in those days. But they were all set free, 
and put on land, where they might go where they 
pleased. 

This unfortunate result of the bold enterprise 
undertaken by Pierre Francois was deeply de- 
plored 1 not only at Tortuga, but in England and 
in France. If this bold buccaneer had captured 
the pearl fleet, it would have been a victory that 
would have made a hero of him on each side of the 
Atlantic, but had he even been able to get away 
with the one vessel he had seized, he would have 
been a rich man, and might have retired to a life of 
ease and affluence; the vessel he had captured 

1 Deplored, regretted, regarded with sorrow. 



THE STORY OF A PEARL PIRATE 29 

proved to be one of the richest laden of the whole 
fleet, and not only in the hearts of Pierre and his 
men, but among his sympathizers in Europe and 
America, there was great disappointment at the 
loss of that mainmast, which, until it cracked, was 
carrying him forward to fame and fortune. 



CHAPTER IV 

The Surprising Adventures of Bartholemy 
Portuguez 

AS we have seen that the buccaneers were 
mainly English, French, and Dutch sailors, 
who were united to make a common pirati- 
ca] warfare upon the Spaniards in the West Indies, 
it may seem a little strange to find a man from Por- 
tugal who seemed to be on the wrong side of this 
peculiar fight which was going on in the new 
world between the sailors of Northern and South- 
ern Europe. But although Portugal is such a close 
neighbor of Spain, the two countries have often 
been at war with each other, and their interests are 
by no means the same. The only advantage that 
Portugal could expect from the newly discovered 
treasures of the West were those which her sea- 
faring men, acting with the seafaring men of other 
nations, should wrest 1 from Spanish vessels home 
ward bound. 

1 Wrest, take by force. 
30 



THE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUEZ 31 

Consequently, there were Portuguese among the 
pirates of those days. Among these was a man 
named Bartholemy Portuguez, a famous flibustier. 
It may be here remarked that the name of bucca- 
neer was chiefly affected by the English adven- 
turers on our coast, while the French members of 
the profession often preferred the name of " flibus- 
tier/ ' l This word, which has since been corrupted 
into our familiar "filibuster," is said to have been 
originally a corruption, being nothing more than 
the French method of pronouncing the word 
"freebooters/' which title had long been used for 
independent robbers. 

Thus, although Bartholemy called himself a 
flibustier, he was really a buccaneer, and his name 
came to be known all over the Caribbean Sea. 2 
From the accounts we have of him it appears that 
he did not start out on his career of piracy as a poor 
man. He had some capital to invest in the busi- 
ness, and when he went over to the West Indies he 
took with him a small ship, armed with four small 
cannon, and manned by a crew of picked men, 
many of them no doubt professional robbers, and 

1 Flibustier (pronounced fle'bus-tya/) . 2 See map. 



32 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

the others anxious for practice in this most alluring 
vocation, for the gold fields of California were 
never more attractive to the bold and hardy adven- 
turers of our country, than were the gold fields of 
the sea to the buccaneers and flibustiers of the 
seventeenth century. 

When Bartholemy reached the Caribbean Sea 
he probably first touched at Tortuga, the pirates' 
headquarters, and then sailed out very much as if 
he had been a fisherman going forth to see what he 
could catch on the sea. He cruised about on 
the track generally taken by treasure ships going 
from the mainland to the Havanas, or to the island 
of Hispaniola, and when at last he sighted a vessel 
in the distance, it was not long before he and his 
men had made up their minds that if they were to 
have any sport that day it would be with what 
might be called most decidedly a game fish, for 
the ship slowly sailing toward them was a large 
Spanish vessel, and from her portholes there pro- 
truded the muzzles of at least twenty cannon. Of 
course, they knew that such a vessel would have a 
much larger crew than their own, and, altogether, 
Bartholemy was very much in the position of a 



THE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUEZ 33 

man who should go out to harpoon a sturgeon, and 
who should find himself confronted by a vicious 
swordfish. 

The Spanish merchantmen of that day were gen- 
erally well armed, for getting home safely across 
the Atlantic was often the most difficult part of the 
treasure-seeking. There were many of these ships, 
which, although they did not belong to the Spanish 
navy, might almost be designated as men-of-war, 
and it was one of these with which our flibustier 
had now met. 

But pirates and fishermen cannot afford to pick 
and choose. They must take what comes to them 
and make the best of it, and this is exactly the way 
in which the matter presented itself to Bartholemy 
and his men. They held one of their councils 
around the mast, and after an address from their 
leader, they decided that come what may, they 
must attack that Spanish vessel. 

So the little pirate sailed boldly toward the big 
Spaniard, and the latter vessel, utterly astonished 
at the audacity of this attack, — for the pirates' 
flag was flying, — lay to, head to the wind, and 
waited, the gunners standing by their cannon. 



34 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

When the pirates had come near enough to see and 
understand the size and power of the vessel they 
had thought of attacking, they did not, as might 
have been expected, put about and sail away at the 
best of their vessel's speed, but they kept straight 
on their course as if they had been about to fall 
upon a great, unwieldy merchantman, manned 
by common sailors. 

Perceiving the foolhardiness of the little vessel, 
the Spanish commander determined to give it a les- 
son which would teach its captain to understand bet- 
ter the relative power of great vessels and little ones, 
so, as soon as the pirates' vessel was near enough, 
he ordered a broadside fired upon it. The Spanish 
ship had a great many people on board. It had a 
crew of seventy men, and besides these there were 
some passengers, and regular marines, and know- 
ing that the captain had determined to fire 
upon the approaching vessel, everybody had 
gathered on deck to see the little pirate ship go 
down. 

But the ten great cannon-balls which were shot 
out at Bartholemy's little craft all missed their aim, 
and before the guns could be reloaded or the great 



THE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUEZ 35 

ship be got around so as to deliver her other broad- 
side, the pirate vessel was alongside of her. Bar- 
tholemy had fired none of his cannon. Such guns 
were useless against so huge a foe. What he was 
after was a hand-to-hand combat on the deck of 
the Spanish ship. 

The pirates were all ready for hot work. They 
had thrown aside their coats and shirts as if each 
of them were going into a prize fight, and, with 
their cutlasses in their hands, and their pistols and 
knives in their belts, they scrambled like monkeys 
up the sides of the great ship. But Spaniards are 
brave men and good fighters, and there were more 
than twice as many of them as there were of the 
pirates, and it was not long before the latter found 
out that they could not capture that vessel by 
boarding it. So over the side they tumbled as fast 
as they could go, leaving some of their number 
dead and wounded behind them. They jumped 
into their own vessel, and then they put off to a 
short distance to take breath and get ready for a 
different kind of a fight. The triumphant Span- 
iards now prepared to get rid of this boat load of 
half -naked wild beasts, which they could easily do 



36 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

by taking better aim with their cannon than they 
had done before. 

But to their amazement they soon found that 
they could do nothing with the guns, nor were they 
able to work their ship so as to get it into position 
for effectual shots. Bartholemy and his men laid 
aside their cutlasses and their pistols, and took up 
their muskets, with which they were well provided. 
Their vessel lay within a very short range of the 
Spanish ship, and whenever a man could be seen 
through the portholes, or showed himself in the 
rigging or anywhere else where it was necessary to 
go in order to work the ship, he made himself 
a target for the good aim of the pirates. The 
pirate vessel could move about as it pleased, for it 
required but a few men to manage it, and so it 
kept out of the way of the Spanish guns, and its 
best marksmen, crouching close to the deck, fired 
and fired whenever a Spanish head was to be seen. 

For five long hours this unequal contest was 
kept up. It might have reminded one of a man 
with a slender rod and a long, delicate line, who 
had hooked a big salmon. The man could not pull 
in the salmon, but, on the other hand, the salmon 



THE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUEZ 37 

could not hurt the man, and in the course of time 
the big fish would be tired out, and the man would 
get out his landing-net and scoop him in. 

Now Bartholemy thought he could scoop in the 
Spanish vessel. So many of her men had been shot 
that the two crews would be more nearly equal. 
So, boldly, he ran his vessel alongside the big ship 
and again boarded her. Then there was another 
great fight on the decks. The Spaniards had 
ceased to be triumphant, but they had become 
desperate, and in the furious combat ten of the 
pirates were killed and four wounded. But the 
Spaniards fared worse than that ; more than half 
of the men who had not been shot by the pirates 
went down before their cutlasses and pistols, and 
it was not long before Bartholemy had captured 
the great Spanish ship. 

It was a fearful and a bloody victory he had 
gained. A great part of his own men were lying 
dead or helpless on the deck, and of the Spaniards 
only forty were left alive, and these, it appears 
from the accounts, must have been nearly all 
wounded or disabled. 

It was a common habit among the buccaneers, 



38 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

as well as among the Spaniards, to kill all prisoners 
who were not able to work for them, but Bar- 
tholemy does not seem to have arrived at the stage 
of depravity necessary for this. So he determined 
not to kill his prisoners, but he put them all into 
a boat and let them go where they pleased ; while 
he was left with fifteen men to work a great vessel 
which required a crew of five times that number. 

But the men who could conquer and capture a 
ship against such enormous odds, felt themselves 
fully capable of working her, even with their little 
crew. Before doing anything in the way of 
navigation they cleared the decks of the dead 
bodies, taking from them all watches, trinkets, and 
money, and then went below to see what sort of a 
prize they had gained. They found it a very good 
one indeed. There were seventy-five thousand 
crowns in money, besides a cargo of cocoa worth 
five thousand more, and this, combined with the 
value of the ship and all its fittings, was a great 
fortune for those days. 

When the victorious pirates had counted their 
gains and had mended the sails and rigging of 
their new ship, they took what they wanted out of 



THE ADVENTURES OF PORTUGUEZ 39 

their own vessel, and left her to sink or to float as 
she pleased, and then they sailed away in the 
direction of the island of Jamaica. But the winds 
did not suit them, and, as their crew was so very 
small, they could not take advantage of light 
breezes as they could have done if they had had 
men enough. Consequently they were obliged to 
stop to get water before they reached the friendly 
vicinity of Jamaica. 

They cast anchor at Cape St. Anthony on the 
west end of Cuba. After" a considerable delay at 
this place they started out again to resume their 
voyage, but it was not long before they perceived, 
to their horror, three Spanish vessels coming 
towards them. It was impossible for a very large 
ship, manned by an extremely small crew, to sail 
away from those fully equipped vessels, and as to 
attempting to defend themselves against the over- 
whelming power of the antagonists, 1 that was too 
absurd to be thought of even by such a reckless 
fellow as Bartholemy. So, when the ship was 
hailed by the Spanish vessels he lay to and waited 
until a boat's crew boarded him. With the eye of 

1 Antagonists, foes. 



40 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

a nautical man the Spanish captain of one of the 
ships perceived that something was the matter 
with this vessel, for its sails and rigging were 
terribly cut up in the long fight through which it 
had passed, and of course he wanted to know what 
had happened. When he found that the great 
ship was in the possession of a very small body of 
pirates, Bartholemy and his men were immediately 
made prisoners, taken on board the Spanish ship, 
stripped of everything they possessed, even their 
clothes, and shut up in the hold. A crew from the 
Spanish ships was sent to man the vessel which had 
been captured, and then the little fleet set sail 
for San Francisco in Campeachy. 1 

An hour had worked a very great change in the 
fortunes of Bartholemy and his men ; in the fine 
cabin of their grand prize they had feasted and 
sung, and had gloried over their wonderful success, 
and now, in the vessel of their captor, they were shut 
up in the dark, to be enslaved or perhaps executed. 

But it is not likely that any one of them either 
despaired or repented ; these are sentiments very 
little in use among pirates. 

1 Campeachy (kam-pe'-che) , formerly a part of Yucatan. 



CHAPTER V 
The Pirate Who could not Swim 

WHEN the little fleet of Spanish vessels, 
including the one which had been cap- 
tured by Bartholemy Portuguez and his 
men, were on their way to Campeachy, 1 they met 
with very stornry weather, so that they were sepa- 
rated, and the ship which contained Bartholemy 
and his companions arrived first at the port for 
which they were bound. 

The captain, who had Bartholemy and the 
others in charge, did not know what an important 
capture he had made; he supposed that these 
pirates were ordinary buccaneers, and it appears 
that it was his intention to keep them as his own 
private prisoners, for, as they were all very able- 
bodied men, they would be extremely useful on a 
ship. But when his vessel was safely moored, and 
it became known in the town that he had a com- 

1 See map. 
41 



42 . STORIES OF TlBE SPANISH MAIN 

pany of pirates on board, a great many people 
came from shore to see these savage men, who were 
probably looked upon very much as though they 
were a menagerie of wild beasts brought from 
foreign lands. 

Among the sightseers who came to the ship was 
a merchant of the town who had seen Bartholemy 
before, and who had heard of his various exploits. 1 
He therefore went to the captain of the vessel and 
informed him that he had on board one of the very 
worst pirates in the whole world, whose wicked 
deeds were well known in various parts of the West 
Indies, and who ought immediately to be delivered 
up to the civil authorities. This proposal, how- 
ever, met with no favor from the Spanish captain, 
who had found Bartholemy a very quiet man, and 
could see that he was a very strong one, and he did 
not at all desire to give up such a valuable addition 
to his crew. But the merchant grew very angry, 
for he knew that Bartholemy had inflicted great 
injury on Spanish commerce, and as the captain 
would not listen to him, he went to the Governor of 
the town and reported the case. When this 

1 Exploits, notable deeds. 



THE PIRATE WHO COULD NOT SWIM 43 

dignitary heard the story he immediately sent a 
party of officers to the ship, and commanded the 
captain to deliver the pirate leader into their 
charge. The other men were left where they 
were, but Bartholemy was taken away and con- 
fined in another ship. The merchant, who seemed 
to know a great deal about him, informed the 
authorities that this terrible pirate had been 
captured several times, but that he had always 
managed to escape ; and, therefore, he was put in 
irons, and preparations were made to execute him 
on the next day. For, from what he had heard, 
the Governor considered that this pirate was no 
better than a wild beast, and that he should be 
put to death without even the formality of a trial. 

But there was a Spanish soldier on board the ship 
who seemed to have had some pity, or perhaps 
some admiration, for the daring pirate, and he 
thought that if he were to be hung the next day it 
was no more than right to let him know it, so that 
when he went in to take some food to Bartholemy 
he told him what was to happen. 

Now this pirate captain was a man who always 
wanted to have a share in what was to happen, and 



44 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

he immediately racked his brain to find out what 
he could do in this case. He had never been in a 
more desperate situation, but he did not lose heart, 
and immediately set to work to free himself from 
his irons, which were probably very clumsy affairs. 
At last, caring little how much he scratched and 
tore his skin, he succeeded in getting rid of his 
fetters, and could move about as freely as a tiger in 
a cage. To get out of this cage was Bartholemy's 
first object. It would be comparatively easy, 
because in the course of time some one would 
come into the hold, and the athletic buccaneer 
thought that he could easily get the better of 
whoever might open the hatch. But the next 
act in this truly melodramatic performance would 
be a great deal more difficult ; for in order to escape 
from the ship it would be absolutely necessary for 
Bartholemy to swim to shore, and he did not know 
how to swim, which seems a strange failing in a 
hardy sailor with so many other nautical 1 accom- 
plishments. In the rough hold where he was shut 
up, our pirate, peering about, anxious and earnest, 
discovered two large earthen jars in which wine had 

1 Nautical, of the sea, of sailors. 



THE PIRATE WHO COULD NOT SWIM 45 

been brought from Spain, and with these he deter- 
mined to make a sort of life-preserver. He found 
some pieces of oiled cloth, which he tied tightly 
over the open mouths of the jars and fastened them 
with cords. He was satisfied that this unwieldy 
contrivance * would support him in the water. 

Among other things he had found in his rum- 
magings about the hold was an old knife, and with 
this in his hand he now sat waiting for a good 
opportunity to attack his sentinel. 

This came soon after nightfall. A man de- 
scended with a lantern to see that the prisoner 
was still secure, — let us hope that it was not 
the soldier who had kindly informed him of his 
fate, -— and as soon as he was fairly in the hold 
Bartholemy sprang upon him. There was a fierce 
struggle, but the pirate was quick and powerful, 
and the sentinel was soon dead. Then, carrying 
his two jars, Bartholemy climbed swiftly and 
noiselessly up the short ladder, came out on deck 
in the darkness, made a rush toward the side of the 
ship, and leaped overboard. For a moment he 
sank below the surface, but the two air-tight jars 

1 Contrivance, something contrived, or made with a purpose. 



46 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 




He soon floated out of Sight and Heaking. 



THE PIRATE WHO COULD NOT SWIM 47 

quickly rose and bore him up with them. There 
was a bustle on board the ship, there was some 
random firing of muskets in the direction of the 
splashing which the watch had heard, but none of 
the balls struck the pirate or his jars, and he soon 
floated out of sight and hearing. Kicking out with 
his legs, and paddling as well as he could with one 
hand while he held on to the jars with the other, 
he at last managed to reach the land, and ran as 
fast as he could into the dark woods beyond the 
town. 

Bartholemy was now greatly in fear that, when 
his escape was discovered, he would be tracked by 
bloodhounds, — for these dogs were much used by 
the Spaniards in pursuing escaping slaves or 
prisoners, — and he therefore did not feel safe in 
immediately making his way along the coast, which 
was what he wished to do. If the hounds should 
get upon his trail, he was a lost man. The des- 
perate pirate, therefore, determined to give the 
bloodhounds no chance to follow him, and for 
three days he remained in a marshy forest, in the 
dark recesses of which he could hide, and where the 
water, which covered the ground, prevented the 



48 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

dogs from following his scent. He had nothing to 
eat except a few roots of water-plants, but he was 
accustomed to privation, and these kept him alive. 
Often he heard the hounds baying on the dry 
land adjoining the marsh, and sometimes he saw at 
night distant torches, which he was sure were 
carried by men who were hunting for him. 

But at last the pursuit seemed to be given up ; 
and hearing no more dogs and seeing no more 
flickering lights, Bartholemy left the marsh and 
set out on his long journey down the coast. The 
place he wished to reach was called Golpho Triste, 1 
which was forty leagues away, but where he had 
reason to suppose he would find some friends. 
When he came out from among the trees, he 
mounted a small hill and looked back upon the 
town. The public square was lighted, and there 
in the middle of it he saw the gallows which had 
been erected for his execution, and this sight, doubt- 
less, animated him very much during the first part 
of his journey. 

The terrible trials and hardships which Bar- 
tholemy experienced during his tramp along the 

1 Golpho Triste. See map. 



THE PIRATE WHO COULD NOT SWIM 49 

coast were such as could have been endured only 
by one of the strongest and toughest of men. He 
had found in the marsh an old gourd, or calabash, 
which he had filled with fresh water, — for he could 
expect nothing but sea- water during his journey, — 
and as for solid food he had nothing but the raw 
shellfish which he found upon the rocks ; but after 
a diet of roots, shellfish must have been a very 
agreeable change, and they gave him all the 
strength and vigor he needed. Very often he 
found streams and inlets which he was obliged to 
ford, and as he could see that they were always 
filled with alligators, the passage of them was not 
very pleasant. His method of getting across one 
of these narrow streams was to hurl rocks into the 
water until he had frightened away the alligators 
immediately in front of him, and then, when he 
had made for himself what seemed to be a free 
passage, he would dash in and hurry across. 

At other times great forests stretched down to 
the very coast, and through these he was obliged to 
make his way, although he could hear the roars 
and screams of wild beasts all about him. Any 
one who is afraid to go down into a dark cellar to 



50 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

get some apples from a barrel at the foot of the 
stairs, can have no idea of the sort of mind pos- 
sessed by Bartholemy Portuguez. The animals 
might howl around him and glare at him with their 
shining eyes, and the alligators might lash the 
water into foam with their great tails, but he was 
bound for Golpho Triste and was not to be stopped 
on his way by anything alive. 

But at last he came to something not alive, 
which seemed to be an obstacle that would cer- 
tainly get the better of him. This was a wide 
river, flowing through the inland country into the 
sea. He made his way up the shore of this river 
for a considerable distance, but it grew but little 
narrower, and he could see no chance of getting 
across. He could not swim, and he had no wine- 
jars now with which to buoy himself up, and if he 
had been able to swim, he would probably have 
been eaten up by alligators soon after he left the 
shore. But a man in his situation would not be 
likely to give up readily ; he had done so much that 
he was ready to do more if he could only find out 
what to do. 

Now a piece of good fortune happened to him, 



THE PIRATE WHO COULD NOT SWIM 51 

although to an ordinary traveller it might have 
been considered a matter of no importance what- 
ever. On the edge of the shore, where it had 
floated down from some region higher up the river, 
Bartholemy perceived an old board, in which there 
were some long and heavy rusty nails. Greatly 
encouraged by this discovery, the indefatigable 
traveller set about a work which resembled that 
of the old woman who wanted a needle, and who 
began to rub a crowbar on a stone in order to 
reduce it to the proper size. Bartholemy carefully 
knocked all the nails out of the board, and then 
finding a large flat stone, he rubbed down one of 
them until he had formed it into the shape of a 
rude knife-blade, which he made as sharp as he 
could. Then with these tools he undertook the 
construction of a raft, working away like a beaver, 
and using the sharpened nails instead of his teeth. 
He cut down a number of small trees, and when he 
had enough of these slender trunks, he bound them 
together with reeds and osiers, which he found on 
the river bank. So, after infinite labor and trial, he 
constructed a raft which would bear him on the 
surface of the water. When he had launched this, 



52 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

he got upon it, gathering up his legs so as to keep 
out of reach of the alligators, and with a long pole 
pushed himself off from shore. Sometimes pad- 
dling and sometimes pushing his pole against the 
bottom, he at last got across the river and took up 
his journey upon dry land. 

But our pirate had not progressed very far upon 
the other side of the river before he met with a 
new difficulty of a very formidable character. This 
was a great forest of mangrove 1 trees, which grow 
in muddy and watery places and which have many 
roots, some coming down from the branches, and 
some extending themselves in a hopeless tangle in 
the water and mud. It would have been impos- 
sible for even a stork to walk through this forest, 
but as there was no way of getting around it Bar- 
tholemy determined to go through it, even if he 
could not walk. No athlete of the present day, no 
matter if he should be a most accomplished circus- 
man, could reasonably expect to perform the feat 
which this bold pirate successfully accomplished. 
For five or six leagues he went through that man- 
grove forest, never once setting his foot upon the 

1 Mangrove, a tropical fruit. 



THE PIRATE WHO COULD NOT SWIM 53 

ground, — by which is meant mud, water, and 
roots, — but swinging himself by his hands and 
arms, from branch to branch, as if he had been a 
great ape, only resting occasionally, drawing him- 
self upon a stout limb where he might sit for a while 
and get his breath. If he had slipped while he was 
swinging from one limb to another and had gone 
down into the mire and roots beneath him, it is 
likely that he would never have been able to get 
out alive. But he made no slips. He might not 
have had the agility and grace of a trapeze per- 
former, but his grasp was powerful and his arms 
were strong* and so he swung and clutched, and 
clutched and swung, until he had gone entirely 
through the forest and had come out on the open 
coast. 



CHAPTER VI 
How Bartholemy rested Himself 

IT was full two weeks from the time that Bar- 
tholemy began his most adventurous and 
difficult journey before he reached the little 
town of Golpho Triste, where, as he had hoped, he 
found some of his buccaneer friends. Now that 
his hardships and dangers were overhand when, 
instead of roots and shellfish, he could sit down to 
good, plentiful meals, and stretch himself upon a 
comfortable bed, it might have been supposed that 
Bartholemy would have given himself a long rest, 
but this hardy pirate had no. desire for a vacation 
at this time. Instead of being worn out and 
exhausted by his amazing exertions and semi- 
starvation, he arrived among his friends vigorous 
and energetic and exceedingly anxious to recom- 
mence business as soon as possible. He told them 
of all that had happened to him, what wonderful 

54 



HOW BARTHOLEMY RESTED HIMSELF 55 

good fortune had come to him, and what terrible 
bad fortune had quickly followed it, and when he 
had related his adventures and his dangers, he 
astonished even his piratical friends by asking 
them to furnish him with a small vessel and about 
twenty men, in order that he might go back and 
revenge himself, not only for what had happened 
to him, but for what would have happened if he 
had not taken his affairs into his own hands. 

To do daring and astounding deeds is part of the 
business of a pirate, and although it was an uncom- 
monly bold enterprise that Bartholemy contem- 
plated, he got his vessel and he got his men, and 
away he sailed. After a voyage of about eight 
days he came in sight of the little seaport town, and 
sailing slowly along the coast, he waited until 
nightfall before entering the harbor. Anchored at 
a considerable distance from shore was the great 
Spanish ship on which he had been a prisoner, and 
from which he would have been taken and hung in 
the public square ; the sight of the vessel filled his 
soul with a savage fury known only to pirates and 
bull dogs. 

As the little vessel slowly approached the great 



56 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ship, the people on board the latter thought it was 
a trading-vessel from shore, and allowed it to come 
alongside, such small craft seldom coming from the 
sea. But the moment Bartholemy reached the 
ship he scrambled up its side almost as rapidly as 
he had jumped down from it with his two wine- 
jars a few weeks before, and every one of his crew, 
leaving their own vessel to take care of itself, 
scrambled up after him. 

Nobody on board was prepared to defend the 
ship. It was the same old story ; resting quietly in 
a peaceful harbor, what danger had they to expect ? 
As usual the pirates had everything their own way ; 
they were ready to fight, and the others were not, 
and they were led by a man who was determined 
to take that ship without giving even a thought to 
the ordinary alternative of dying in the attempt. 
The affair was more of a massacre than a combat, 
and there were people on board who did not know 
what was taking place until the vessel had been 
captured. 

As soon as Bartholemy was master of the great 
vessel he gave orders to slip the cable and hoist the 
sails, for he was anxious to get out of that harbor 



HOW BARTHOLEMY RESTED HIMSELF 57 

as quickly as possible. The fight had apparently 
attracted no attention in the town, but there were 
ships in the port whose company the bold bucca- 
neer did not at all desire, and as soon as possible 
he got his grand prize under way and went sailing 
out of the port. 

Now, indeed, was Bartholemy triumphant ; the 
ship he had captured was a finer one and a richer 
one than that other vessel which had been taken 
from him. It was loaded with valuable merchan- 
dise, and we may here remark that for some reason 
or other all Spanish vessels of that day which were 
so unfortunate as to be taken by pirates seemed to 
be richly laden. 

If our bold pirate had sung wild pirate songs, as 
he passed the flowing bowl while carousing * with 
his crew in the cabin of the Spanish vessel he had 
first captured, he now sang wilder songs, and 
passed more flowing bowls, for this prize was a 
much greater one than the first. If Bartholemy 
could have communicated his great good fortune 
to the other buccaneers in the West Indies, there 
would have been a boom in piracy which would 

1 Carousing, drinking and sporting. 



58 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

have threatened great danger to the honesty and 
integrity of the seafaring men of that region. 

But nobody, not even a pirate, has any way of 
finding out what is going to happen next, and if 
Bartholemy had had an idea of the fluctuations x 
that were about to occur in the market in which 
he had made his investments he would have been 
in a great hurry to sell all his stock very much 
below par. The fluctuations referred to occurred 
on the ocean, near the island of Pinos, and came in 
the shape of great storm waves, which blew the 
Spanish vessel with all its rich cargo, and its trium- 
phant pirate crew, high up upon the cruel rocks, 
and wrecked it absolutely and utterly. Bar- 
tholemy and his men barely managed to get into a 
little boat, and row themselves away. All the 
wealth and treasure which had come to them with 
the capture of the Spanish vessel, all the power 
which the possession of that vessel gave them, and 
all the wild joy which came to them with riches 
and power were lost to them in as short a space of 
time as it had taken to gain them. 

In the way of well-defined and conspicuous ups 

1 Fluctuations, movements, up and down, like waves. 



HOW BART HOLEMY RESTED HIMSELF 59 

and downs, few lives surpassed that of Bartholemy 
Portuguez. But after this he seemed in the 
language of the old English song, "All in the 
downs." He had many adventures after the 
desperate affair in the bay of Campeachy, but they 
must all have turned out badly for him, and, 
consequently, very well, it is probable, for divers 
and sundry Spanish vessels, and, for the rest of his 
life, he bore the reputation of an unfortunate 
pirate. He was one of those men whose success 
seemed to have depended entirely upon his own 
exertions. If there happened to be the least 
chance of his doing anything, he generally did it ; 
Spanish cannon, well-armed Spanish crews, mana- 
cles, imprisonment, the dangers of the ocean to a 
man who could not swim, bloodhounds, alligators, 
wild beasts, awful forests impenetrable to com- 
mon men, all these were bravely met and 
triumphed over by Bartholemy. 

But when he came to ordinary good fortune, 
such as any pirate might expect, Bartholemy the 
Portuguese found that he had no chance at all. 
He was not a common pirate, and was, there- 
fore, obliged to fie content with his uncommon 



60 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

career. He eventually settled in the island of 
Jamaica, but nobody knows what became of him. 
If it so happened that he found himself obliged to 
make his living by some simple industry, such as 
the selling of fruit upon a street corner, it is likely 
he never disposed of a banana or an orange unless 
he jumped at the throat of a passer-by and com- 
pelled him to purchase. As for sitting still and 
waiting for customers to come to him, such a man 
as Bartholemy would not be likely to do anything 
so commonplace. 



CHAPTER VII 
A Pirate Author 

IN the days which we are considering there were 
all sorts of pirates, some of whom gained much 
reputation in one way and some in another, 
but there was one of them who had a disposition 
different from that of any of his fellows. He was a 
regular pirate, but it is not likely that he ever did 
much fighting, for, as he took great pride in the 
brave deeds of the Brethren of the Coast, he would 
have been sure to tell us of his own if he had ever 
performed any. He was a mild-mannered man, 
and, although he was a pirate, he eventually laid 
aside the pistol, the musket, and the cutlass, 
and took up the pen, — a very uncommon weapon 
for a buccaneer. 

This man was John Esquemeling, supposed by 
some to be a Dutchman, and by others a native of 
France. He sailed to the West Indies in the year 
1666, in the service of the French West India 

61 



62 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Company. He went out as a peaceable merchant 
clerk, and had no more idea of becoming a pirate 
than he had of going into literature, although he 
finally did both. 

At that time the French West India Company 
had a colonial establishment on the island of Tor- 
tuga, which was principally inhabited, as we have 
seen before, by buccaneers in all their various 
grades and stages, from beef-driers to pirates. The 
French authorities undertook to supply these 
erratic people with the goods and provisions which 
they needed, and built storehouses with every- 
thing necessary for carrying on the trade. There 
were plenty of purchasers, for the buccaneers were 
willing to buy everything which could be brought 
from Europe. They were fond of good wine, good 
groceries, good firearms, and ammunition, fine 
cutlasses, and very often good clothes, in which 
they could disport themselves when on shore. 
But they had peculiar customs and manners, and 
although they were willing to buy as much as the 
French traders had to sell, they could not be pre- 
vailed upon to pay their bills. A pirate is not the 
sort of a man who generally cares to pay his bills. 



A PIRATE AUTHOR 63 

When he gets goods in any way, he wants them 
charged to him, and if that charge includes the 
features of robbery and murder, he will probably 
make no objection. But as for paying' good 
money for what is received, that is quite another 
thing. 

That this was the state of feeling on the island 
of Tortuga was discovered before very long by the 
French mercantile agents, who then applied to the 
mother country for assistance in collecting the 
debts due them, and a body of men, who might be 
called collectors, or deputy sheriffs, was sent out to 
the island ; but although these officers were armed 
with pistols and swords, as well as with authority, 
they could do nothing with the buccaneers, and 
after a time the work of endeavoring to collect 
debts from pirates was given up. And as there 
was no profit in carrying on business in this way, 
the mercantile agency was also given up, and its 
officers were ordered to sell out everything they 
had on hand, and come home. There was, there- 
fore, a sale, for which cash payments were 
demanded, and there was a great bargain day on 
the island of Tortuga. Everything was disposed 



64 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

of, — the stock of merchandise on hand, the tables, 
the desks, the stationery, the bookkeepers, the 
clerks, and the errand boys. The living items of 
the stock on hand were considered to be property 
just as if they had been any kind of merchandise, 
and were sold as slaves. 

Now poor John Esquemeling found himself in 
a sad condition. He was bought by one of the 
French officials who had been left on the island, 
and he described his new master as a veritable 
fiend. He was worked hard, half fed, treated cru- 
elly in many ways, and to add to his misery, his 
master tantalized 1 him by offering to set him free 
upon the payment of a sum of money equal to 
about three hundred dollars. He might as well 
have been asked to pay three thousand or three 
million dollars, for he had not a penny in the 
world. 

At last he was so fortunate as to fall sick, and 
his master, as avaricious as he was cruel, fearing 
that this creature he owned might die, and thus be 
an entire loss to him, sold him to a surgeon, very 
much as one would sell a sick horse to a veterinary 

1 Tantalized, teased. 



A PIRATE AUTHOR 65 

surgeon, on the principle that he might make some- 
thing out of the animal by curing him. 

His new master treated Esquemeling very well, 
and after he had taken medicine and food enough 
to set him upon his legs, and had worked for the 
surgeon about a year, that kind master offered him 
his liberty if he would promise, as soon as he could 
earn the money, to pay him one hundred dollars, 
which would be a profit to his owner, who had paid 
but seventy dollars for him. This offer, of course, 
Esquemeling accepted with delight, and having 
made the bargain, he stepped forth upon the warm 
sands of the island of Tortuga a free and happy 
man. But he was as poor as a church mouse. 
He had nothing in the world but the clothes on his 
back, and he saw no way in which he could make 
money enough to keep himself alive until he had 
paid for himself. He tried various ways of sup- 
port, but there was no opening for a young business 
man in that section of the country, and at last he 
came to the conclusion that there was only one 
way by which he could accomplish his object, and 
he therefore determined to enter into "the wicked 
order of pirates or robbers at sea." 



66 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

It must have been a strange thing for a man 
accustomed to pens and ink, to yardsticks and 
scales, to feel obliged to enroll himself into a com- 
pany of bloody, big-bearded pirates, but a man 
must eat, and buccaneering was the only pro- 
fession open to our ex-clerk. For some reason or 
other, certainly not on account of his bravery and 
daring, Esquemeling was very well received by 
the pirates of Tortuga. Perhaps they liked him 
because he was a mild-mannered man and so 
different from themselves. Nobody was afraid of 
him, every one felt superior to him, and we are all 
very apt to like people to whom we feel superior., 

As for Esquemeling himself, he soon came to 
entertain the highest opinion of his pirate compan- 
ions. He looked upon the buccaneers who had 
distinguished themselves as great heroes, and it 
must have been extremely gratifying to those 
savage fellows to tell Esquemeling all the wonder- 
ful things they had done. In the whole of the 
West Indies there was no one who was in the habit 
of giving such intelligent attention to the accounts 
of piratical depredations 1 and savage sea-fights, as 

1 Depredations, robberies, plunderings. 



A PIRATE AUTHOR 67 

was Esquemeling, and if he had demanded a 
salary as a listener, there is no doubt that it would 
have been paid to him. 

It was not long before his intense admiration of 
the buccaneers and their performances began to 
produce in him the feeling that the history of these 
great exploits should not be lost to the world, and 
so he set about writing the lives and adventures 
of many of the buccaneers with whom he became 
acquainted. 

He remained with the pirates for several years, 
and during that time worked very industriously 
getting material together for his history. When 
he returned to his own country in 1672, having 
done as much literary work as was possible among 
the uncivilized surroundings of Tortuga, he- there 
completed a book, which he called "The Bucca- 
neers of America, or The True Account of the Most 
Remarkable Assaults Committed of Late Years 
Upon the Coasts of the West Indies by the 
Buccaneers, etc., by John Esquemeling, One of 
the Buccaneers, Who Was Present at Those 
Tragedies." 

From this title it is probable that our literary 



68 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

pirate accompanied his comrades on their various 
voyages and assaults, in the capacity of reporter, 
and although he states he was present at many of 
"those tragedies/' he makes no reference to any 
deeds of valor or cruelty performed by himself, 
which shows him to have been a wonderfully con- 
scientious historian. There are persons, however, 
who doubt his impartiality, 1 because, as he liked 
the French, he always gave the pirates of that 
nationality the credit for most of the bravery 
displayed on their expeditions, and all of the 
magnanimity 2 and courtesy, if there happened to 
be any, while the surliness, brutality, and ex- 
traordinary wickednesses were all ascribed to the 
English. But be this as it may, Esquemeling's 
history was a great success. It was written in 
Dutch and was afterwards translated into English, 
French, and Spanish. It contained a great deal 
of information regarding buccaneering in general, 
and most of the stories of pirates which we have 
already told, and many of the surprising narrations 
which are to come, have been taken from the book 
of this buccaneer historian. 

1 Impartiality, fairness. 2 Magnanimity, generosity. 



CHAPTER VIII 
The Story of Roc, the Brazilian 

HAVING given the history of a very plain 
and quiet buccaneer, who was a reporter 
and writer, and who, if he were now liv- 
ing, would be eligible as a member of an Authors' 
Club, we will pass to the consideration of a regu- 
lar out-and-out pirate, one from whose masthead 
would have floated the black flag with its skull 
and crossbones if that emblematic x piece of 
bunting had been in use by the pirates of the 
period. 

This famous buccaneer was called Roc, because 
he had to have a name, and his own was unknown, 
and "the Brazilian," because he was born in Bra- 
zil, though of Dutch parents. Unlike most of 
his fellow-practitioners he did not gradually 
become a pirate. From his early youth he never 
had an intention of being anything else. As 

1 Emblematic, having a meaning. 
69 



70 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

soon as he grew to be a man he became a bloody 
buccaneer, and at the first opportunity he joined 
a pirate crew, and had made but a few voyages 
when it was perceived by his companions that he 
was destined to become a most remarkable sea- 
robber. He was offered the command of a ship 
with a well-armed crew of marine savages, and 
in a very short time after he had set out on his 
first independent cruise he fell in with a Spanish 
ship loaded with silver bullion; having captured 
this, he sailed with his prize to Jamaica, which 
was one of the great resorts of the English bucca- 
neers. There his success delighted the commu- 
nity, his talents for the conduct of great piratical 
operations soon became apparent, and he was 
generally acknowledged as the Head Pirate of 
the West Indies. 

He was now looked upon as a hero even by 
those colonists who had no sympathy with pirates, 
and as for Esquemeling, he simply worshipped the 
great Brazilian desperado. If he had been writ- 
ing the life and times of Alexander the Great, 
Julius Caesar, or Mr. Gladstone, he could not 
have been more enthusiastic in his praises. And 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 71 

as in The Arabian Nights the roc is described as 
the greatest of birds, so, in the eyes of the bucca- 
neer biographer, this Roc was the greatest of pi- 
rates. But it was not only in the mind of the his- 
torian that Roc now became famous ; the better 
he became known, the more general was the fear 
and respect felt for him, and we are told that the 
mothers of the islands used to put their children 
to sleep by threatening them with the terrible 
Roc if they did not close their eyes. This story, 
however, I regard with a great deal of doubt; it 
has been told of Saladin and many other wicked 
and famous men, but I do not believe it is an 
easy thing to frighten a child into going to sleep. 
If I found it necessary to make a youngster take 
a nap, I should say nothing of the condition 
of affairs in Cuba or of the persecutions of the 
Armenians. 

This renowned pirate from Brazil must have 
been a terrible fellow to look at. He was strong 
and brawny, his face was short and very wide, 
with high cheek-bones, and his expression probably 
resembled that of a pug-dog. . His eyebrows were 
enormously large and bushy, and from under 



72 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

them he glared at his mundane x surroundings. 
He was not a man whose spirit could be quelled 
by looking him steadfastly in the eye. It was 
his custom in the daytime to walk about, carrying 
a drawn cutlass, resting easily upon his arm, 
edge up, very much as a fine gentleman carries 
his high silk hat, and any one who should imperti- 
nently stare or endeavor to quell his high spirits 
in any other way, would probably have felt the 
edge of that cutlass descending* rapidly through 
his physical organism. 

He was a man who insisted upon being obeyed, 
and if any one of his crew behaved improperly, 
or was even found idle, this strict and inexor- 
able master would cut him down where he stood. 
But although he was so strict and exacting during 
the business sessions of his piratical year, by 
which I mean when he was cruising around after 
prizes, he was very much more disagreeable when 
he was taking a vacation. On his return to 
Jamaica after one of his expeditions it was his 
habit to give himself some relaxation after the 
hardships and dangers through which he had 

1 Mundane, wordly, of this world. 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 73 

passed, and on such occasions it was a great 
comfort to Roc to get himself thoroughly drunk. 
With his cutlass waving high in the air, he would 
rush out into the street and take a whack at 
every one whom he met. As far as was possible 
the citizens allowed him to have the street to 
himself, and it was not at all likely that his visits 
to Jamaica were looked forward to with any 
eager anticipations. 

Roc, it may be said, was not only a bloody 
pirate, but a blooded one ; he was thoroughbred. 
From the time he had been able to assert his 
individuality he had been a pirate, and there was 
no reason to suppose that he would ever reform 
himself into anything else. There were exten- 
uating * circumstances in his case> The appre- 
ciative Esquemeling, who might be called the 
Boswell of the buccaneers, could never have 
met his hero Roc, when that bushy-bearded 
pirate was running "amuck" in the streets, for 
if he had, it is not probable that his book would 
have been written. He assures us that when 
Roc was not drunk, he was esteemed, but at the 

1 Extenuating, excusing, making less evil. 



74 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

same time feared; but there are various ways 
of gaining esteem, and Roc's method certainly 
succeeded very well in the case of his literary, 
associate. 

As we have seen, the hatred of the Spaniards 
by the buccaneers began very early in the settle- 
ment of the West Indies, and in fact, it is very 
likely that if there had been no Spaniards, there 
would never have been any buccaneers; but in 
all the instances of ferocious enmity toward the 
Spaniards there has been nothing to equal the 
feelings of Roc, the Brazilian, upon that subject. 
His dislike to everything Spanish arose, he de- 
clared, from cruelties which had been practised 
upon his parents by people of that nation, and 
his main principle of action throughout all his 
piratical career seems to have been that there 
was nothing too bad for a Spaniard. The object 
of his life was to wage bitter war against Spanish 
ships and Spanish settlements. He seldom gave 
any quarter to his prisoners, and would often 
subject them to horrible tortures in order to 
make them tell where he could find the things 
he wanted. There is nothing horrible that has 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 75 

ever been written or told about the buccaneer 
life, which could not have been told about Roc, 
the Brazilian. He was a typical pirate. 

Roc was very successful in his enterprises, 
and took a great deal of valuable merchandise 
to Jamaica, but although he and his crew were 
always rich men when they went on shore, they 
did not remain in that condition very long. The 
buccaneers of that day were all very extravagant, 
and, moreover, they were great gamblers, and 
it was not uncommon for them to lose everything 
they possessed before they had been on shore 
a week. Then there was nothing for them to 
do but to go on board their vessels and put out 
to sea in search of some fresh prize. So far 
Roc's career had been very much like that of 
many other Companions of the Coast, differing 
from them only in respect to intensity and force, 
but he was a clever man with ideas, and was able 
to adapt himself to circumstances. 

He was cruising about Campeachy without 
seeing any craft that was worth capturing, when 
he thought that it would be very well for him to go 
out on a sort of marine scouting expedition and 



76 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

find out whether or not there were any Spanish 
vessels in the bay which were well laden and which 
were likely soon to come out. So, with a small 
boat filled with some of his trusty men, he rowed 
quietly into the port to see what he could discover. 
If he had had Esquemeling with him, and had 
sent that mild-mannered observer into the har- 
bor to investigate into the state of affairs, and 
come back with a report, it would have been a 
great deal better for the pirate captain, but he 
chose to go himself, and he came to grief. No 
sooner did the people on the ships lying in the 
harbor behold a boat approaching with a big- 
browed, broad-jawed mariner sitting in the stern, 
and with a good many more broad-backed, hairy 
mariners than were necessary pulling at the oars, 
than they gave the alarm. The well-known 
pirate was recognized, and it was not long before 
he was captured. Roc must have had a great 
deal of confidence in his own powers, or perhaps 
he relied somewhat upon the fear which his very 
presence evoked. But he made a mistake this 
time ; he had run into the lion's jaw, and the lion 
had closed his teeth upon him. 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 77 

When the pirate captain and his companions 
were brought before the Governor, he made no 
pretence of putting them to trial. Buccaneers 
were outlawed by the Spanish, and were considered 
as wild beasts to be killed without mercy wherever 
caught. Consequently Roc and his men were 
thrown into a dungeon and condemned to be 
executed. If, however, the Spanish Governor 
had known what was good for himself, he would 
have had them killed that night. 

During the time that preparations were going 
on for making examples of these impertinent 
pirates, who had dared to enter the port of Cam- 
peachy, Roc was racking his brains to find some 
method of getting out of the terrible scrape into 
which he had fallen. This was a branch of the 
business in which a capable pirate was obliged 
to be proficient; if he could not get himself out 
of scrapes, he could not expect to be successful. 
In this case there was no chance of cutting down 
sentinels, or jumping overboard with a couple 
of wine-jars for a life-preserver, or of doing any 
of those ordinary things which pirates were in the 
habit of doing when escaping from their captors. 



78 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Roc and his men were in a dungeon on land, 
inside of a fortress, and if they escaped from this, 
they would find themselves unarmed in the midst 
of a body of Spanish soldiers. Their stout arms 
and their stout hearts were of no use to them 
now, and they were obliged to depend upon their 
wits if they had any. Roc had plenty of wit, 
and he Used it well. There was a slave, probably 
not a negro nor a native, but most likely some 
European who had been made prisoner, who 
came in to bring him food and drink, and by the 
means of this man the pirate hoped to play a 
trick upon the Governor. He promised the slave 
that if he would help him, — and he told him it 
would be very easy to do so, — he would give 
him money enough to buy his freedom and to 
return to his friends, and this, of course, was a 
great inducement 1 to the poor fellow, who may 
have been an Englishman or a Frenchman in 
good circumstances at home. The slave agreed 
to the proposals, and the first thing he did was 
to bring some writing-materials to Roc, who 
thereupon began the composition of a letter 

1 Inducement, attraction, furnishing motive. 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 79 

upon which he based all his hopes of life and 
freedom. 

When he was coming into the bay, Roc had 
noticed a large French vessel that was lying at 
some distance from the town, and he wrote his 
letter as if it had come from the captain of this 
ship. In the character of this French captain 
he addressed his letter to the Governor of the 
town, and in it he stated that he had under- 
stood that certain Companions of the Coast, for 
whom he had great sympathy, — for the French 
and the buccaneers were always good friends, — 
had been captured by the Governor, who, he 
heard, had threatened to execute them. Then 
the French captain, by the hand' of Roc, went 
on to say that if any harm should come to these 
brave men, who had been taken and imprisoned 
when they were doing no harm to anybody, he 
would swear, in his most solemn manner, that 
never, for the rest of his life, would he give quarter 
to any Spaniard who might fall into his hands, 
and he, moreover, threatened that any kind of 
vengeance which should become possible for the 
buccaneers and French united, to inflict upon 



80 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

the Spanish ships, or upon the town of Campeachy, 
should be taken as soon as possible after he should 
hear of any injury that might be inflicted upon 
the unfortunate men who were then lying im- 
prisoned in the fortress. 

When the slave came back to Roc, the letter 
was given to him with very particular directions 
as to what he was to do with it. He was to 
disguise himself as much as possible, so that he 
should not be recognized by the people of the 
place, and then in the night he was to make his 
way out of the town, and early in the morning 
he was to return as if he had been walking along 
the shore of the harbor, when he was to state 
that he had been put on shore from the French 
vessel in the offing, with a letter which he was to 
present to the Governor. 

The slave performed his part of the business 
very well. The next day, wet and bedraggled 
from making his way through the weeds and mud 
of the coast, he presented himself at the fortress 
with his letter, and when he was allowed to take 
it to the Governor, no one suspected that he was 
a person employed about the place. Having 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 81 





% .. 


•"•-''""' " & 


BK^aLfl 


;_" ^ ,^J 




-■■ ;: - ' 




~''^}{c~^/^ 


. 




-JHHI^^H 



When the Slave came back to Roc, the Letter was 
given to him with very particular directions." 



82 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

fulfilled his mission, he departed, and when seen 
again, he was the same servant whose business 
it was to carry food to the prisoners. 

The Governor read the letter with a disquieted 
mind; he knew that the French ship which was 
lying outside the harbor was a powerful vessel 
and he did not like French ships, anyway. The 
town had once been taken and very badly treated 
by a little fleet of French and English buccaneers, 
and he was very anxious that nothing of the kind 
should happen again. There was no great Spanish 
force in the harbor at that time, and he did not 
know how many buccaneering vessels might be 
able to gather together in the bay if it should 
become known that the great pirate Roc had 
been put to death in Campeachy. It was an un- 
usual thing for a prisoner to have such powerful 
friends so near by, and the Governor took Roc's 
case into most earnest consideration. A few 
hours' reflection was sufficient to convince him 
that it would be very unsafe to tamper 1 with such 
a dangerous prize as the pirate Roc, and he 
determined to get rid of him as soon as possible. 

1 Tamper, meddle. 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 83 

He felt himself in the position of a man who has 
stolen a baby-bear, and who hears the roar of 
an approaching parent through the woods; to 
throw away the cub and walk off as though he 
had no idea there were any bears in that forest 
would be the inclination of a man so situated, 
and to get rid of the great pirate without pro- 
voking the vengeance of his friends was the natural 
inclination of the Governor. 

Now Roc and his men were treated well, and 
having been brought before the Governor, were 
told that in consequence of their having com- 
mitted no overt act of disorder they would be 
set at liberty and shipped to England, upon the 
single condition that they would abandon piracy, 
and agree to become quiet citizens in whatever 
respectable vocation they might select. 

To these terms Roc and his men agreed without 
argument. They declared that they would retire 
from the buccaneering business, and that nothing 
would suit them better than to return to the ways 
of civilization and virtue. There was a ship 
about to depart for Spain, and on this the Gov- 
ernor gave Roc and his men free passage to the 



84 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

other side of the ocean. There is no doubt that 
our buccaneers would have much preferred to 
have been put on board the French vessel ; but 
as the Spanish Governor had started his prisoners 
on the road to reform, he did not wish to throw 
them into the way of temptation by allowing 
them to associate with such wicked companions 
as Frenchmen, and Roc made no suggestion of 
the kind, knowing very well how greatly aston- 
ished the French captain would be if the Governor 
were to communicate with him on the subject. 

On the voyage to Spain Roc was on his good 
behavior, and he was a man who knew how to 
behave very well when it was absolutely necessary: 
no doubt there must have been many dull days 
on board ship when he would have been delighted 
to gamble, to get drunk, and to run " amuck' ' up 
and down the deck. But he carefully abstained 
from all these recreations, and showed himself to 
be such an able-bodied and willing sailor that the 
captain allowed him to serve as one of the crew. 
Roc knew how to do a great many things; not 
only could he murder and rob, but he knew how 
to turn an honest penny when there was no other 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 85 

way of filling his purse. He had learned among 
the Indians how to shoot fish with bow and arrows, 
and on this voyage across the Atlantic he occupied 
all his spare time in sitting in the rigging and 
shooting the fish which disported themselves 
about the vessel. These fish he sold to the of- 
ficers, and we are told that in this way he earned 
no less than five hundred crowns, perhaps that 
many dollars. If this account is true, fish must 
have been very costly in those days, but it showed 
plainly that if Roc had desired to get into an 
honest business, he would have found fish-shoot- 
ing a profitable occupation. In every way Roc 
behaved so well that for his sake all his men were 
treated kindly and allowed many privileges. 

But when this party of reformed pirates reached 
Spain and were allowed to go where they pleased, 
they thought no more of the oaths they had 
taken to abandon piracy than they thought of 
the oaths which they had been in the habit of 
throwing right and left when they had been 
strolling about on the island of Jamaica. They 
had no ship, and not enough money to buy one, 
but as soon as they could manage it they sailed 



86 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

back to the West Indies, and eventually found 
themselves in Jamaica, as bold and as bloody 
buccaneers as ever they had been. 

Not only did Roc cast from him every thought 
of reformation and a respectable life, but he 
determined to begin the business of piracy on a 
grander scale than ever before. He made a 
compact with an old French buccaneer, named 
Tributor, and with a large company of buccaneers 
he actually set out to take a town. Having lost 
everything he possessed, and having passed such a 
long time without any employment more profit- 
able than that of shooting fish with a bow and 
arrows, our doughty l pirate now desired to make 
a grand strike, and if he could take a town and 
pillage it of everything valuable it contained, 
he would make a very good fortune in a very 
short time, and might retire, if he chose, from the 
active practice of his profession. 

The town which Roc and Tributor determined 
to attack was Merida, 2 in Yucatan, and although 
this was a bold and rash undertaking, the two 
pirates were bold and rash enough for anything. 

1 Doughty, valiant. 2 Merida. See map. 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 87 

Roc had been a prisoner in Merida, and on account 
of his knowledge of the town he believed that he 
and his followers could land upon the coast, and 
then quietly advance upon the town without their 
approach being discovered. If they could do this, 
it would be an easy matter to rush upon the unsus- 
pecting garrison, and, having annihilated * these, 
make themselves masters of the town. 

But their plans did not work very well; they 
were discovered by some Indians, after they had 
landed, who hurried to Merida and gave notice 
of the approach of the buccaneers. Conse- 
quently, when Roc and his companions reached 
the town, they found the garrison prepared for 
them, cannons loaded, and all the approaches 
guarded. Still the pirates did not hesitate ; they 
advanced fiercely to the attack just as they were 
accustomed to do when they were boarding a 
Spanish vessel, but they soon found that fighting 
on land was very different from fighting at sea. 
In a marine combat it is seldom that a party of 
boarders is attacked in the rear by the enemy, 
although on land such methods of warfare may 

1 Annihilate, destroy entirely. 



88 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

always be expected; but Roc and Tributor did 
not expect anything of the kind, and they were, 
therefore, greatly dismayed when a party of 
horsemen from the town, who had made a wide 
detour x through the woods, suddenly charged 
upon their rear. Between the guns of the garrison 
and the sabres of the horsemen the buccaneers 
had a very hard time, and it was not long before 
they were completely defeated. Tributor and 
a great many of the pirates were killed or taken, 
and Roc, the Brazilian, had a terrible fall. 

This most memorable fall occurred in the 
estimation of John Esquemeling, who knew all 
about the attack on Merida, and who wrote the 
account of it. But he had never expected to be 
called upon to record that his great hero, Roc, the 
Brazilian, saved his life, after the utter defeat of 
himself and his companions, by ignominiously 2 
running away. The loyal chronicler had as firm 
a belief in the absolute inability of his hero to 
fly from danger as was shown by the Scottish 
Douglas, when he stood, his back against a mass 
of stone, and invited his enemies to " Come one, 

1 Detour, a roundabout way. 2 Ignominiously, shamefully. 



THE STORY OF ROC, THE BRAZILIAN 89 

come all." The bushy-browed pirate of the drawn 
cutlass had so often expressed his contempt for a 
soldier who would even surrender, to say nothing 
of running away, that Esquemeling could scarcely 
believe that Roc had retreated from his enemies, 
deserted his friends, and turned his back upon 
the principles which he had always so truculently 
proclaimed. 

But this downfall of a hero simply shows that 
Esquemeling, although he was a member of the 
piratical body, and was proud to consider himself 
a buccaneer, did not understand the true nature of 
a pirate. Under the brutality, the cruelty, the 
dishonesty, and the recklessness of the sea-robbers 
of those days, there was nearly always meanness 
and cowardice. Roc, as we have said in the begin- 
ning of this sketch, was a typical pirate; under 
certain circumstances he showed himself to have 
all those brave and savage qualities which Es- 
quemeling esteemed and revered, and under other 
circumstances he showed those other qualities 
that Esquemeling despised, but which are neces- 
sary to make up the true character of a pirate. 

The historian John seems to have been very 



90 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

much cut up by the manner in which his favorite 
hero had rounded off his piratical career, and after 
that he entirely dropped Roc from his chronicles. 
This out-and-out pirate was afterwards living in 
Jamaica, and probably engaged in new enterprises, 
but Esquemeling would have nothing more to do 
with him nor with the history of his deeds. 



CHAPTER IX 
A Pirate Potentate 

SOMETIME in the last half of the seven- 
teenth century on a quiet farm in a secluded 
part of Wales there was born a little boy 
baby. His father was a farmer, and his mother 
churned, and tended the cows and the chickens, 
and there was no reason to imagine that this 
gentle little baby, born and reared in this rural 
solitude, would become one of the most formi- 
dable pirates that the world ever knew. Yet 
such was the case. 

The baby's name was Henry Morgan, and as he 
grew to be a big boy a distaste for farming grew 
with him. So strong was his dislike that when he 
became a young man, he ran away to the seacoast, 
for he had a fancy to be a sailor. There he found 
a ship bound for the West Indies, and in this he 
started out on his life's career. He had no money 
to pay his passage, and he therefore followed the 

91 



92 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

usual custom of those days and sold himself for 
a term of three years to an agent who was taking 
out a number of men to work on the plantations. 
In the places where these men were enlisted they 
were termed servants, but when they got to the 
new world, they were generally called slaves and 
treated as such. 

When young Morgan reached the Barbadoes 
he was resold to a planter, and during his term of 
service he probably worked a good deal harder 
and was treated much more roughly than any of 
the laborers on his father's farm. But as soon as 
he was a free man he went to Jamaica, and there 
were few places in the world where a young man 
could be more free and more independent than 
in this lawless island. 

Here were rollicking and blustering "flibustiers," 
and here the young man determined to study 
piracy. He was not a sailor and hunter who by 
the force of circumstances gradually became a 
buccaneer, but he deliberately selected his pro- 
fession, and immediately set to work to acquire 
a knowledge of its practice. There was a bucca- 
neer ship about to sail from Jamaica, and on this 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 93 

Morgan enlisted. He was a clever fellow, and 
very soon showed himself to be a brave and able 
sailor. 

After three or four voyages he acquired a rep- 
utation for remarkable coolness in emergencies, 
and showed an ability to take advantage of 
favorable circumstances, which was not possessed 
by many of his comrades. These prominent 
traits in his character became the foundation of 
his success. He also proved himself a very good 
business man, and having saved a considerable 
amount of money, he joined with some other 
buccaneers and bought a ship, of which he took 
command. This ship soon made itself a scourge 
in the Spanish seas ; no other buccaneering vessel 
was so widely known and. so greatly feared, and 
the English people in these regions were as proud 
of the young Captain Morgan as if he had been 
a regularly commissioned admiral, cruising against 
an acknowledged enemy. 

Returning from one of his voyages, Morgan 
found an old buccaneer, named Mansvelt, in 
Jamaica, who had gathered together a fleet of 
vessels with which he was about to sail for the 



94 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

mainland. This expedition seemed a promising 
one to Morgan, and he joined it, being elected 
vice-admiral of the fleet of fifteen vessels. Attacks 
upon towns had become very popular with the 
buccaneers, whose leaders were getting to be 
tired of the retail branch of their business ; that 
is, sailing about in one ship and capturing such 
merchantmen as it might fall in with. 

Mansvelt's expedition took with it not only six 
hundred fighting pirates, but one writing pirate, for 
John Esquemeling accompanied it, and so far as 
the fame and reputation of these adventurers 
was concerned his pen was mightier than their 
swords, for had it not been for his account of their 
deeds very little about them would have been 
known to the world. 

The fleet sailed directly for St. Catherine, 1 an 
island near Costa Rica, which was strongly forti- 
fied by the Spaniards and used by them as a 
station for ammunition and supplies, and also as 
a prison. The pirates landed upon the island and 
made a most furious assault upon the fortifications, 
and although they were built of stone and well 

4 St. Catherine. See map. 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 95 

furnished with cannon, the savage assailants met 
with their usual good fortune. They swarmed 
over the walls and carried the place at the edge 
of the cutlass and the mouth of the pistol. In 
this fierce fight Morgan performed such feats of 
valor that even some of the Spaniards who had 
been taken prisoners, were forced to praise his 
extraordinary courage and ability as a leader. 

The buccaneers proceeded to make very good 
use of their victory. They captured some small 
adjoining islands and brought the cannon from 
them to the main fortress, which they put in a 
good condition of defence. Here they confined 
all their prisoners and slaves, and supplied the 
island with an abundance of stores and provisions. 

It is believed that when Mansvelt formed the 
plan of capturing this island, he did so with the 
idea of founding there a permanent pirate princi- 
pality, the inhabitants of which should not con- 
sider themselves English, French, or Dutch, but 
plain pirates, having a nationality and country of 
their own. Had the seed thus planted by Mans- 
velt and Morgan grown and matured, it is not 
unlikely that the whole of the West Indies might 



96 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

now be owned and inhabited by an independent 
nation, whose founders were the bold buccaneers. 

When everything had been made tight and right 
at St. Catherine, Mansvelt and Morgan sailed for 
the mainland, for the purpose of attacking an 
inland town called Nata, but in this expedition 
they were not successful. The Spanish Governor 
of the province had heard of their approach, and 
met them with a body of soldiers so large that 
they prudently gave up the attempt, — a proceed- 
ing not very common with them, but Morgan was 
not only a dare-devil of a pirate, but a very shrewd 
Welshman. 

They returned to the ships, and after touching 
at St. Catherine and leaving there, under the com- 
mand of a Frenchman named Le Sieur Simon, 
enough men to defend it, they sailed for Jamaica. 
Everything at St. Catherine was arranged for 
permanent occupation ; there was plenty of fresh 
water, and the ground could be cultivated, and 
Simon was promised that additional forces should 
be sent him so that he could hold the island as a 
regular station for the assembling and fitting out 
of pirate vessels. 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 97 

. The permanent pirate colony never came to any- 
thing ; no reinforcements 1 were sent ; Mansvelt 
died, and the Spaniards gathered together a suffi- 
cient force to retake the island of St. Catherine, 
and make prisoners of Simon and his men. This 
was a blow to Morgan, who had had great hopes 
of the fortified station he thought he had so firmly 
established, but after the project failed he set 
about forming another expedition. 

He was now recognized as buccaneer-in-chief 
of the West Indies, and he very soon gathered 
together twelve ships and seven hundred men. 
Everything was made ready to sail, and the only 
thing left to be done was to decide what particular 
place they should favor with a visit. 

There were some who advised an attack upon 
Havana, giving as a reason that in that city there 
were a great many nuns, monks, and priests, and 
if they could capture them, they might ask as ran- 
som for them a sum a great deal larger than they 
could expect to get from the pillage of an ordinary 
town. But Havana was considered to be too 
strong a place for a profitable venture, and after 

1 Reinforcements, additional troops. 



98 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

several suggestions had been made, at last a 
deserter from the Spanish army, who had joined 
them, came forward with a good idea. He told 
the pirates of a town in Cuba, to which he knew 
the way ; it was named Port-au-Prince, 1 and was 
situated so far inland that it had never been 
sacked. When the pirates heard that there 
existed an entirely fresh and unpillaged town, 
they were filled with as much excited delight as 
if they had been a party of schoolboys who had 
just been told where they might find a tree full of 
ripe apples which had been overlooked by the 
men who had been gathering the crop. 

When Morgan's fleet arrived at the nearest 
harbor to Port-au-Prince, he landed his men and 
marched toward the town, but he did not succeed 
in making a secret attack, as he had hoped. One 
of his prisoners, a Spaniard, let himself drop over- 
board as soon as the vessels cast anchor, and 
swimming ashore, hurried to Port-au-Prince and 
informed the Governor of the attack which was 
about to be made on the town. Thus prepared 
this able commander knew just what to do. He 

1 Port-au-Prince. See map. 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 99 

marched a body of soldiers along the road by which 
the pirates must come, and when he found a 
suitable spot, he caused great trees to be cut down 
and laid across the road, thus making a formidable 
barricade. Behind this his soldiers were posted 
with their muskets and their cannon, and when 
the pirates should arrive, they would find that they 
would have to do some extraordinary fighting 
before they could pass this well-defended barrier. 

When Morgan came within sight of this barri- 
cade, he understood that the Spaniards had 
discovered his approach, and so he called a halt. 
He had always been opposed to unnecessary 
work, and he considered that it would be entirely 
unnecessary to attempt to disturb this admirable 
defence, so he left the road, marched his men into 
the woods, led them entirely around the barricades, 
and then, after proceeding a considerable distance, 
emerged upon a wide plain which lay before the 
town. Here he found that he would have to 
fight his way into the city, and, probably much 
to his surprise, his men were presently charged 
by a body of cavalry. 

Pirates, as a rule, have nothing to do with 



100 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

horses, either in peace or war, and the Governor of 
the town no doubt thought that when his well- 
armed horsemen charged upon these men, accus- 
tomed to fighting on the decks of ships, and totally 
unused to cavalry combats, he would soon scatter 
and disperse them. But pirates are peculiar 
fighters ; if they had been attacked from above 
by means of balloons, or from below by mines and 
explosives, they would doubtless have adapted 
their style of defence to the method of attack. 
They always did this, and according to Esqueme- 
ling they nearly always got the better of their 
enemies; but we must remember that in cases 
where they did not succeed, as happened when 
they marched against the town of Nata, he says 
very little about the affair and amplifies only the 
accounts of their successes. 

But the pirates routed the horsemen, and, after 
a fight of about four hours, they routed all the 
other Spaniards who resisted them, and took 
possession of the town. Here they captured a 
great many prisoners whom they shut up in the 
churches and then sent detachments out into the 
country to look for those who had run away. 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 101 

Then these utterly debased and cruel men began 
their usual course after capturing a town ; they 
pillaged, feasted, and rioted ; they gave no thought 
to the needs of the prisoners whom they had shut 
up in the churches, many of whom starved to 
death; they tortured the poor people to make 
them tell where they had hid their treasures. 
They had come for the express purpose of taking 
everything that the people possessed, and until 
they had forced from them all that was of the 
slightest value, they were not satisfied. Even 
when the poor citizens seemed to have given up 
everything they owned, they were informed that 
if they did not pay two heavy ransoms, one to 
protect themselves from being carried away into 
slavery, and one to keep their town from being 
burned, the same punishments would be inflicted 
upon them. 

For two weeks the pirates waited for the unfor- 
tunate citizens to go out into the country and find 
some of their townsmen who had escaped with a 
portion of their treasure. In those days people 
did not keep their wealth in banks as they do 
now, but every man was the custodian of most of 



102 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

his own possessions, and when they fled from the 
visitation of an enemy, they took with them every- 
thing of value that they could carry. If their 
fortunes had been deposited in banks, it would 
doubtless have been more convenient for the 
pirates. 

Before the citizens returned Morgan made a dis- 
covery: a negro was captured who carried letters 
from the Governor of Santiago, a neighboring city, 
to some of the citizens of Port-au-Prince, telling 
them not to be in too great a hurry to pay the ran- 
som demanded by the pirates, because he was com- 
ing with a strong force to their assistance. When 
Morgan read these letters, he changed his mind, 
and thought it would be a wise thing not to stay in 
that region any longer than could be helped. So 
he decided not to wait for the unfortunate citizens 
to collect the heavy ransom he demanded, but told 
them that if they would furnish him with five hun- 
dred head of cattle, and also supply salt and help 
prepare the meat for shipment, he would make no 
further demands upon them. This, of course, the 
citizens were glad enough to do, and when the buc- 
caneers had carried to the ships everything they 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 103 

had stolen, and when the beef had been put on 
board, they sailed away. 

Morgan directed the course of the fleet to a small 
island on which he wished to land in order that 
they might take an account of stock and divide 
the profits. This the pirates always did as soon 
as possible after they had concluded one of their 
nefarious enterprises. But his men were not at all 
satisfied with what happened on the island. Mor- 
gan estimated the total value of the booty to be 
about fifty thousand dollars, and when this com- 
paratively small sum was divided, many of the 
men complained that it would not give them 
enough to pay their debts in Jamaica. They were 
utterly astonished that after having sacked an 
entirely fresh town they should have so little, and 
there is no doubt that many of them believed that 
their leader was a man who carried on the business 
of piracy for the purpose of enriching himself, 
while he gave his followers barely enough to keep 
them quiet. 

There was, however, another cause of discon- 
tent among a large body of the men ; it appears 
that the men were very fond of rnarrow-bones, and 



104 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN , 

while they were yet at Port-au-Prince and the 
prisoners were salting the meat which was to go on 
the ships, the buccaneers went about among them 
and took the marrow-bones which they cooked 
and ate while they were fresh. One of the men, a 
Frenchman, had selected a very fine bone, and had 
put it by his side while he was preparing some other 
tidbits, when an Englishman came along, picked 
up the bone, and carried it away. 

Now even in the chronicles of Mother Goose we 
are told of the intimate connection between 
Welshmen, thievery, and marrow-bones; for 

"Taffy was a Welshman, 
Taffy was a thief, 
Taffy came to my house 
And stole a leg of beef. 

"' I went to Taffy's house, 
Taffy wasn't home, 
Taffy went to my house, 
And stole a marrow-bone." 

What happened to Taffy we do not know, but 
Morgan was a Welshman, Morgan was a thief, and 
one of his men had stolen a marrow-bone ; there- 



A PIRATE POTENTATE 105 

fore came trouble. The Frenchman challenged 
the Englishman; but the latter, being a mean 
scoundrel, took advantage of his opponent, unfairly 
stabbed him in the back, and killed him. 

Now all the Frenchmen in the company rose in 
furious protest, and Morgan, wishing to pacify 
them, had the English assassin put in chains, and 
promised that he would take him to Jamaica and 
deliver him to justice. But the Frenchmen 
declined to be satisfied ; they had received but 
very little money after they had pillaged a rich 
town, and they believed that their English com- 
panions were inclined to take advantage of them 
in every way, and consequently the greater part of 
them banded together and deliberately deserted 
Morgan, who was obliged to go back to Jamaica 
with not more than half his regular forces, doubt- 
less wishing that the cattle on the island of Cuba 
had been able to get along without marrow-bones. 



CHAPTER X 
The Story of a High-minded Pirate 

AFTER having considered the extraordinary 
performances of so many of those execra- 
ble 1 wretches, the buccaneers, it is refresh- 
ing and satisfactory to find that there Were 
exceptions even to the rules which governed the 
conduct and general make-up of the ordinary pirate 
of the period, and we are therefore glad enough to 
tell the story of a man, who, although he was an 
out-and-out buccaneer, possessed some peculiar 
characteristics which give him a place of his own 
in the history of piracy. 

In the early part of these sketches we have 
alluded to a gentleman of France, who, having 
become deeply involved in debt, could see no 
way of putting himself in a condition to pay his 
creditors but to go into business of some kind. 
He had no mercantile education, he had not 

1 Execrable, abominable. 
106 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 107 

learned any profession, and it was therefore 
necessary for him to do something for which a 
previous preparation was not absolutely essential. 

After having carefully considered all the 
methods of making money which were open to him 
under the circumstances, he finally concluded to 
take up piracy. 

The French gentleman whose adventures we are 
about to relate was a very different man from John 
Esquemeling, who was a literary pirate and 
nothing more. Being of a clerkly disposition, the 
gentle John did not pretend to use the sabre or the 
pistol. His part in life was simply to watch his 
companions fight, burn, and steal, while his only 
weapon was his pen, with which he set down their 
exploits and thereby murdered their reputations. 

But Monsieur Raveneau de Lussan was both 
buccaneer and author, and when he had finished his 
piratical career, he wrote a book in which he gave a 
full account of it, thus showing that although he 
had not been brought up to a business life, he had 
very good ideas about money-making. 

More than that, he had very good ideas about 
his own reputation, and instead of leaving his 



108 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

exploits and adventures to be written up by other 
people, — that is, if any one should think it worth 
while to do so, — he took that business into his 
own hands. He was well educated, he had been 
brought up in good society, and as he desired to 
return to that society it was natural for him to 
wish to paint his own portrait as a buccaneer. 
Pictures of that kind as they were ordinarily 
executed were not at all agreeable to the eyes of 
the cultivated classes of France, and so M. de 
Lussan determined to give his personal attention 
not only to his business speculations, but to his 
. reputation. He went out as a buccaneer in order 
to rob the Spaniards of treasure with which to 
pay his honest debts, and, in order to prevent his 
piratical career being described in the coarse and 
disagreeable fashion in which people generally 
wrote about pirates, he determined to write his 
own adventures. 

If a man wishes to appear well before the world, 
it is often a very good thing for him to write his 
autobiography, especially if there is anything a 
little shady in his career, and it may be that de 
Lussan's reputation as a high-minded pirate de- 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 109 

pends somewhat on the book he wrote after he 
had put down the sword and taken up the pen ; 
but if he gave a more pleasing color to his proceed- 
ings than they really deserved, we ought to be 
glad of it. For, even if de Lussan the buccaneer 
was in some degree a creature of the imagination 
of de Lussan the author, we have a story which is 
much more pleasing and, in some respects, more 
romantic than stories of ordinary ' pirates could 
possibly be made unless the writer of such stories 
abandoned fact altogether and plunged blindly 
into fiction. 

Among the good qualities of de Lussan was a 
pious disposition. He had always been a religious 
person, and, being a Catholic, he had a high regard 
and veneration for religious buildings, for priests, 
and for the services of the church, and when he had 
crossed the Atlantic in his ship, the crew of which 
was composed of desperadoes of various nations, 
and when he had landed upon the western conti- 
nent, he wished still to conform to the religious 
manners and customs of the old world. 

Having a strong force under his command and 
possessing, in common with most of the gentle- 



110 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

men of that period, a good military education, it 
was not long after he landed on the mainland 
before he captured a small town. The resistance 
which he met was soon overcome, and our high- 
minded pirate found himself in the position of a 
conqueror with a community at his mercy. As 
his piety now raised itself above all his other at- 
tributes, the first thing that he did was to repair 
to the principal church of the town, accompanied 
by all his men, and here, in accordance with his 
commands, a Te Deum was sung and services were 
conducted by the priests in charge. Then, after 
having properly performed his religious duties, de 
Lussan sent his men through the town with orders 
to rob the inhabitants of everything valuable they 
possessed. 

The ransacking and pillaging of the houses con- 
tinued for some time, but when the last of his men 
had returned with the booty they had collected, 
the high-minded chief was dissatisfied. The town 
appeared to be a good deal poorer than he had 
expected, and as the collection seemed to be so very 
small, de Lussan concluded that in some way or 
other he must pass around the hat again. While 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 111 

he was wondering how he should do this he hap- 
pened to hear that on a sugar plantation not very 
far away from the town there were some ladies of 
rank who, having heard of the approach of the 
pirates, had taken refuge there, thinking that 
even if the town should be captured, their savage 
enemies would not wander into the country to 
look for spoils and victims. 

But these ladies were greatly mistaken. When 
de Lussan heard where they were, he sent out a 
body of men to make them prisoners and bring 
them back to him. They might not have any 
money or jewels in their possession, but as they 
belonged to good families who were probably 
wealthy, a good deal of money could be made out 
of them by holding them and demanding a heavy 
ransom for their release. So the ladies were all 
"brought to town and shut up securely until their 
friends and relatives managed to raise enough 
money to pay their ransom and set them free, and 
then, I have no doubt, de Lussan advised them to 
go to church and offer up thanks for their happy 
deliverance. 

As our high-minded pirate pursued his plunder- 



112 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ing way along the coast of South America, he met 
with a good many things which jarred upon his 
sensitive nature — things he had not expected 
when he started out on his new career. One of his 
disappointments was occasioned by the manners 
and customs of the English buccaneers under his 
command. These were very different from the 
Frenchmen of his company, for they made not the 
slightest pretence to piety. 

When they had captured a town or a village, the 
Englishmen would go to the churches, tear down 
the paintings, chop the ornaments from the altars 
with their cutlasses, and steal the silver crucifixes, 1 
the candlesticks, and even the communion services. 
Such conduct gave great pain to de Lussan. To 
rob and destroy the property of churches was in his 
eyes a great sin, and he never suffered anything of 
the kind if he could prevent it. When he found in 
any place which he captured a wealthy religious 
community or a richly furnished church, he 
scrupulously refrained from taking anything or 
from doing damage to property, and contented 
himself with demanding heavy indemnity, which 

1 Crucifixes, small crosses used in worship. 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 113 

the priests were obliged to pay as a return for the 
pious exemption which he granted them. 

But it was very difficult to control the English- 
men. They would rob and destroy a church as 
willingly as if it were the home of a peaceful family, 
and although their conscientious commander did 
everything he could to prevent their excesses, he 
did not always succeed. If he had known what 
was likely to happen, his party would have con- 
sisted entirely of Frenchmen. 

Another thing which disappointed and annoyed 
the gentlemanly de Lussari was the estimation in 
which the buccaneers were held by the ladies of the 
country through which he was passing. He soon 
found that the women in the Spanish settlements 
had the most horrible ideas regarding the members 
of the famous " Brotherhood of the Coast." To be 
sure, all the Spanish settlers, and a great part of the 
natives of the country, were filled with horror and 
dismay whenever they heard that a company of buc- 
caneers was within a hundred miles of their homes, 
and it is not surprising that this was the case, for 
the stories of the atrocities and cruelties of these 
desperadoes had spread over the western world. 



114 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

But the women of the settlements looked upon 
the buccaneers with greater fear and abhorrence 1 
than the men could possibly feel, for the belief was 
almost universal among them that buccaneers were 
terrible monsters of cannibal habits who delighted 
in devouring human beings, especially if they hap- 
pened to be young and tender. This ignorance of 
the true character of the invaders of the country 
was greatly deplored by de Lussan. He had a 
most profound pity for those simple-minded per- 
sons who had allowed themselves to be so deceived 
in regard to the real character of himself and his 
men, and whenever he had an opportunity, he 
endeavored to persuade the ladies who fell in his 
way that sooner than eat a woman he would 
entirely abstain from food. 

On one occasion, when politely conducting a 
young lady to a place of confinement, where in 
company with other women of good family she was 
to be shut up until their relatives could pay hand- 
some ransoms for their release, he was very much 
surprised when she suddenly turned to him with 
tears in her eyes, and besought him not to devour 

1 Abhorrence, extreme dislike. 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 115 

her. This astonishing speech so wounded the feel- 
ings of the gallant Frenchman that for a moment 
he could not reply, and when he asked her what 
had put such an unreasonable fear in her mind, 
she could only answer that she thought he looked 
hungry, and that perhaps he would not be willing 
to wait until — And there she stopped, for she 
could not bring her mind to say — until she was 
properly prepared for the table. 

"What!" exclaimed the high-minded pirate. 
"Do you suppose that I would eat you in the 
street ?" And as the poor girl, who was now cry- 
ing, would make him no answer, he fell into a 
sombre silence which continued until they had 
reached their destination. 

The cruel aspersions 1 which were cast upon his 
character by the women of the country were very 
galling to the chivalrous soul of this gentleman of 
France, and in every way possible he endeavored to 
show the Spanish ladies that their opinions of him 
were entirely incorrect, and even if his men were 
rather a hard lot of fellows, they were not cannibals. 

The high-minded pirate had now two principal 

1 Aspersions, false tales. 



116 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

objects before him. One was to lay his hand upon 
all the treasure he could find, and the other was 
to show the people of the country, especially the 
ladies, that he was a gentleman of agreeable man- 
ners and a pious turn of mind. 

It is highly probable that for some time the hero 
of this story did not succeed in his first object as 
well as he would have liked. A great deal of treas- 
ure was secured, but some of it consisted of prop- 
erty which could not be easily turned into cash 
or carried away, and he had with him a body of 
rapacious * and conscienceless scoundrels who were 
continually clamoring for as large a share of the 
available spoils — such as jewels, money, and small 
articles of value — as they could induce their com- 
mander to allow them, and, in consequence of this 
greediness of his own men, his share of the plunder 
was not always as large as it ought to be. 

But in his other object he was very much more 
successful, and, in proof of this, we have only to 
relate an interesting and remarkable adventure 
which befell him. He laid siege to a large town, 
and, as the place was well defended by fortifica- 

1 Rapacious, greedy, grasping. 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 117 

tions and armed men, a severe battle took place 
before it was captured. But at last the town was 
taken, and de Lussan and his men having gone to 
church to give thanks for their victory, — his 
Englishmen being obliged to attend the services no 
matter what they did afterward, — he went dili- 
gently to work to gather from the citizens their 
valuable and available possessions. In this way 
he was brought into personal contact with a great 
many of the people of the town, and among the 
acquaintances which he made was that of a young 
Spanish lady of great beauty. 

The conditions and circumstances in the midst 
of which this lady found herself after the city had 
been taken, were very peculiar. She had been the 
wife of one of the principal citizens, the treasurer 
of the town, who was possessed of a large fortune, 
and who lived in one of the best houses in the 
place ; but during the battle with the buccaneers, 
her husband, who fought bravely in defence of 
the place, was killed, and she now found herself 
not only a widow, but a prisoner in the hands of 
those ruthless 1 pirates whose very name had struck 

1 Ruthless, without mercy. 



118 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

terror into the hearts of the Spanish settlers. 
Plunged into misery and despair, it was impossible 
for her to foresee what was going to happen to 
her. 

As has been said, the religious services in the 
church were immediately followed by the pillage of 
the town ; every house was visited, and the trem- 
bling inhabitants were obliged to deliver up their 
treasures to the savage fellows who tramped 
through their halls and rooms, swearing savagely 
when they did not find as much as they expected, 
and laughing with wild glee at any unusual dis- 
covery of jewels or coin. 

The buccaneer officers as well as the men assisted 
in gathering in the spoils of the town, and it so 
happened that M. Raveneau de Lussan, with his 
good clothes and his jaunty hat with a feather in it, 
selected the house of the late treasurer of the city 
as a suitable place for him to make his investiga- 
tions. He found there a great many valuable 
articles and also found the beautiful young widow. 

The effect produced upon the mind of the lady 
when the captain of the buccaneers entered her 
house was a very surprising one. Instead of be- 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 119 

holding a savage, brutal ruffian, with ragged 
clothes and gleaming teeth, she saw a handsome 
gentleman, as well dressed as circumstances would 
permit, very polite in his manners, and with as 
great a desire to transact his business without 
giving her any more inconvenience than was 
necessary, as if he had been a tax-collector. If all 
the buccaneers were such agreeable men as this 
one, she and her friends had been laboring under a 
great mistake. 

De Lussan did not complete his examination of 
the treasurer's house in one visit, and during the 
next two or three days the young widow not only 
became acquainted with the character of bucca- 
neers in general, but she learned to know this par- 
ticular buccaneer very well, and to find out what 
an entirely different man he was from the savage 
fellows who composed his company. She was 
grateful to him for his kind manner of appro- 
priating her possessions, she was greatly interested 
in his society, — for he was a man of culture and 
information, — and in less than three days she 
found herself very much in love with him. There 
was not a man in the whole town who, in her 



120 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

opinion, could compare with this gallant com- 
mander of buccaneers. 

It was not very long before de Lussan became 
conscious of the favor he had found in the eyes of 
this lady ; for as a buccaneer could not be expected 
to remain very long in one place, it was necessary, 
if this lady wished the captor of her money and 
treasure to know that he had also captured her 
heart, that she must not be slow in letting him 
know the state of her affections, and being a young 
person of a very practical mind she promptly in- 
formed de Lussan that she loved him and desired 
him to marry her. 

The gallant Frenchman was very much amazed 
when this proposition was made to him, which was 
in the highest degree complimentary. It was very 
attractive to him — but he could not understand 
it. The lady's husband had been dead but a few 
days — he had assisted in having the unfortunate 
gentleman properly buried — and it seemed to him 
very unnatural that the young widow should be in 
such an extraordinary hurry to prepare a marriage 
feast before the funeral baked meats had been 
cleared from the table. 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 121 

There was but one way in which he, could explain 
to himself this remarkable transition from grief to 
a new affection. He believed that the people of 
this country were like their fruits and their flowers. 
The oranges might fall from the trees, but the 
blossoms would still be there. Husband and wives 
or lovers might die, but in the tropical hearts of 
these people it was not necessary that new affec- 
tions should be formed, for they were already 
there, and needed only some one to receive 
them. 

As he did not undertake his present expedition 
for the purpose of marrying ladies, no matter how 
beautiful they might be, it is quite natural that 
de Lussan should not accept the proffered hand of 
the young widow, But when she came to detail 
her plans, he found that it would be well worth his 
while to carefully consider her project. 

The lady was by no means a thoughtless young 
creature, carried away by a sudden attachment. 
Before making known to de Lussan her preference 
for him above all other men, she had given the 
subject her most careful and earnest consideration, 
and had made plans which in her opinion would 



122 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

enable the buccaneer captain and herself to settle 
the matter to the satisfaction of all parties. 

When de Lussan heard the lady's scheme, he 
was as much surprised by her businesslike ability 
as he had been by the declaration of her affection 
for him. She knew very well that he could not 
marry her and take her with him. Moreover, she 
did not wish to go. She had no fancy for such 
wild expeditions and such savage companions. 
Her plans were for peace and comfort and a happy 
domestic life. In a word, she desired that the 
handsome de Lussan should remain with her. 

Of course the gentleman opened his eyes very 
wide when he heard this, but she had a great deal 
to say upon the subject, and she had not omitted 
any of the details which would be necessary for the 
success of her scheme. 

The lady knew just as well as the buccaneer cap- 
tain knew that the men under his command would 
not allow him to remain comfortably in that town 
with his share of the plunder, while they went on 
without a leader to undergo all sorts of hardships 
and dangers, perhaps defeat and death. If he 
announced his intention of withdrawing from the 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 123 

band, his enraged companions would probably kill 
him. Consequently a friendly separation between 
himself and his buccaneer followers was a thing not 
to be thought of, and she did not even propose it. 

Her idea was a very different one. Just as soon 
as possible, that very night, de Lussan was to slip 
quietly out of the town, and make his way into the 
surrounding country. She would furnish him with 
a horse, and tell him the way he should take, and 
he was not to stop until he had reached a secluded 
spot, where she was quite sure the buccaneers 
would not be able to find him, no matter how 
diligently they might search. When they had 
entirely failed in every effort to discover their lost 
captain, who they would probably suppose had 
been killed by wandering Indians, — for it was 
impossible that he could have been murdered in 
the town without their knowledge, — they would 
give him up as lost and press on in search of fur- 
ther adventures. 

When the buccaneers were far away, and all 
danger from their return had entirely passed, then 
the brave and polite Frenchman, now no longer a 
buccaneer, could safely return to the town, where 



124 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

the young widow would be most happy to marry 
him, to lodge him in her handsome house, and to 
make over to him all the large fortune and estates 
which had been the property of her late husband. 

This was a very attractive offer surely, a beauti- 
ful woman and a handsome fortune. But she 
offered more than this. She knew that a gentle- 
man who had once captured and despoiled the 
town might feel a little delicacy in regard to marry- 
ing and settling there and becoming one of its 
citizens, and therefore she was prepared to remove 
any objections which might be occasioned by such 
considerate sentiments on his part. 

She assured him that if he would agree to her 
plan, she would use her influence with the author- 
ities, and would obtain for him the position of city 
treasurer, which her husband had formerly held. 
And when he declared that such an astounding per- 
formance must be utterly impossible, she started 
out immediately, and having interviewed the Gov- 
ernor of the town and other municipal 1 officers, 
secured their signature to a paper in which they 
promised that if M. de Lussan would accept the 

1 Municipal, of a city or town. 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 125 

proposals which the lady had made, he would be 
received most kindly by the officers and citizens of 
the town ; that the position of treasurer would be 
given to him, and that all the promises of the lady 
should be made good. 

Now our high-minded pirate was thrown into a 
great quandary, and although at first he had had no 
notion whatever of accepting the pleasant proposi- 
tion which had been made to him by the young 
widow, he began to see that there were many good 
reasons why the affection, the high position, and 
the unusual advantages which she had offered to 
him might perhaps be the very best fortune which 
he could expect in this world. In the first place, 
if he should marry this charming young creature 
and settle down as a respected citizen and an officer 
of the town, he would be entirely freed from the 
necessity of leading the life of a buccaneer, and this 
life was becoming more and more repugnant to him 
every day, — not only on account of the highly dis- 
agreeable nature of his associates and their reck- 
less deeds, but because the country was becoming 
aroused, and the resistance to his advances was 
growing stronger and stronger. In the next attack 



126 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

he made upon a town or village he might receive a 
musket ball in his body, which would end his career 
and leave his debts in France unpaid. 

More than that, he was disappointed, as has 
been said before, in regard to the financial successes 
he had expected. At that time he saw no immedi- 
ate prospect of being able to go home with money 
enough in his pocket to pay off his creditors, and 
if he did not return to his native land under those 
conditions, he did not wish to return there at all. 
Under these circumstances it seemed to be wise and 
prudent, that if he had no reason to expect to be 
able to settle down honorably and peaceably in 
France, to accept this opportunity to settle honor- 
ably, peaceably, and in every way satisfactorily in 
America. 

It is easy to imagine the pitching and the tossing 
in the mind of our French buccaneer. The more he 
thought of the attractions of the fair widow and 
of the wealth and position which had been offered 
him, the more he hated all thoughts of his piratical 
crew, and of the dastardly and cruel character of 
the work in which they were engaged. If he could 
have trusted the officers and citizens of the town, 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 127 

there is not much doubt that he would have 
married the widow, but those officers and citizens 
were Spaniards, and he was a Frenchman. A week 
before the inhabitants of the place had been pros- 
perous, contented, and happy. Now they had 
been robbed, insulted, and in many cases ruined, 
and he was commander of the body of desperadoes 
who had robbed and ruined them. Was it likely 
that they would forget the injuries which he had 
inflicted upon them simply because he had married 
a wealthy lady of the town and had kindly con- 
sented to accept the office of city treasurer ? 

It was much more probable that when his men 
had really left that part of the country the citi- 
zens would forget all their promises to him and 
remember only his conduct toward them, and that 
even if he remained alive long enough to marry the 
lady and take the position offered him, it would not 
be long before she was again a widow and the 
office vacant. 

So de Lussan shut his eyes to the tempting pros- 
pects which were spread out before him, and pre- 
ferring rather to be a live buccaneer than a dead 
city treasurer, he told the beautiful widow that he 



128 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

could not marry her and that he must go forth 
again into the hard, unsympathetic world to fight, 
to burn, to steal, and to be polite. Then, fearing 
that if he remained, he might find his resolution 
weakened, he gathered together his men and his 
pillage, and sadly went away, leaving behind him a 
joyful town and a weeping widow. 

If the affection of the young Spanish lady for the 
buccaneer chief was sufficient to make her take an 
interest in his subsequent 1 career, she would proba- 
bly have been proud of him, for the ladies of, those 
days had a high opinion of brave men and success- 
ful warriors. De Lussan soon proved that he was 
not only a good fighter, but that he was also an able 
general, and his operations on the western coast of 
South America were more like military campaigns 
than ordinary expeditions of lawless buccaneers. 

He attacked and captured the city of Panama, 2 
always an attractive prize to the buccaneer forces, 
and after that he marched down the western coast 
of South America, conquering and sacking many 
towns. As he now carried on his business in a 
somewhat wholesale way, it could not fail to bring 

1 Subsequent, following, later. 2 Panama. See map. 



STORY OF A HIGH-MINDED PIRATE 129 

him in a handsome profit, and in the course of 
time he felt that he was able to retire from the 
active practice of his profession and to return to 
France. 

But as he was going back into the circles of 
respectability, he wished to do so as a respectable 
man. He discarded his hat and plume, he threw 
away his great cutlass and his heavy pistols, and 
attired in the costume of a gentleman in society he 
prepared himself to enter again upon his old life. 
He made the acquaintance of some of the French 
colonial officers in the West Indies, and obtaining 
from them letters of introduction to the Treasurer- 
General of France, he went home as a gentleman 
who had acquired a fortune by successful enter- 
prises in the new world. 

The pirate who not only possesses a sense of 
propriety and a sensitive mind, but is also gifted 
with an ability to write a book in which he 
describes his own actions and adventures, is to 
be credited with unusual advantages, and as 
Raveneau de Lussan possessed these advantages, 
he has come down to posterity as a high-minded 
pirate. 



CHAPTER XI 
The Great Blackbeard comes upon the Stage 

SO long as the people of the Carolinas were 
prosperous and able to capture and exe- 
cute pirates who interfered with their trade, 
the Atlantic sea-robbers kept away from their 
ports, but this prosperity did not last. Indian 
wars broke out, and in the course of time the 
colonies became very much weakened and im- 
poverished, and then it was that the harbor of 
Charles Town began to be again interesting to the 
pirates. 

About this time one of the most famous of sea- 
robbers was harassing 1 the Atlantic coast of North 
America, and from New England to the West 
Indies he was known as the great pirate Black- 
beard. This man, whose real name was Thatch, 
was a most terrible fellow in appearance as well 
as action. He wore a long, heavy, black beard, 

1 Harassing, troubling. 
130 



BLACKBEARD COMES ON THE STAGE 131 

which it was his fancy to separate into tails, each 
one tied with a colored ribbon, and often tucked 
behind his ears. Some of the writers of that day 
declared that the sight of this beard would create 
more terror in any port of the American seaboard 
than would the sudden appearance of a fiery comet. 
Across his brawny breast he carried a sort of sling 
in which hung not less than three pairs of pistols in 
leathern holsters, and these, in addition to his 
cutlass and a knife or two in his belt, made him a 
most formidable-looking fellow. 

Some of the fanciful recreations of Blackbeard 
show him to have been a person of consistent pur- 
pose. Even in his hours of rest, when he was not 
fighting or robbing, his savage soul demanded 
some interesting excitement. Once he was seated 
at table with his mate and two or three sailors, 
and when the meal was over, he took up a pair of 
pistols, and cocking them put them under the 
table. This peculiar action caused one of the 
sailors to remember very suddenly that he had 
something to do on deck, and he immediately 
disappeared. But the others looked at their 
captain in astonishment, wondering what he would 



132 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

do next. They soon found out ; for crossing the 
pistols, still under the table, he fired them. One 
ball hit the mate in the leg, but the other struck no 
one. When asked what he meant by this strange 
action, he replied that if he did not shoot one of his 
men now and then, they would forget what sort of 
a person he was. 

At another time he invented a game ; he gathered 
his officers and crew together and told them that 
they were going to play that they were living in 
the lower regions. Thereupon the whole party fol- 
lowed him down in the hold. The hatches and all 
the other openings were closed, and then Black- 
beard began to illuminate the scene with fire and 
brimstone. The sulphur burned, the fumes rose, a 
ghastly light spread over the countenances of the 
desperadoes, and very soon some of them began to 
gasp and cough and implore the captain to let in 
some fresh air, but Blackbeard was bound to have 
a good game, and he proceeded to burn more brim- 
stone. He laughed at the gasping fellows about 
him and declared that he would be just as willing 
to breathe the fumes of sulphur as common air. 
When at last he threw open the hatches, some of 



BLACKBEARD COMES ON THE STAGE 133 

the men were almost dead, but their stalwart 
captain had not even sneezed. 

In the early part of the eighteenth century Black- 
beard made his headquarters in one of the inlets on 
the North Carolina coast, and there he ruled as 
absolute king, for the settlers in the vicinity seemed 
to be as anxious to oblige him as the captains of the 
merchantmen sailing along the coast were anxious 
to keep out of his way. On one of his voyages 
Blackbeard went down the coast as far as 
Honduras, 1 where he took a good many prizes, 
and as some of the crews of the captured vessels 
enlisted under him he sailed north with a stronger 
force than ever before, having a large ship of forty 
guns, three smaller vessels, and four hundred men. 
With this little fleet Blackbeard made for the coast 
of South Carolina, and anchored outside the harbor 
of Charles Town. He well understood the present 
condition of the place and was not in the least 
afraid that the citizens would hang him up on the 
shores of the bay. 

Blackbeard began work without delay. Several 
well-laden ships — the Carolinians having no idea 

1 Honduras. See map. 



134 STORIES OF TH^ SPANISH MAIN 

that pirates were waiting for them — came sailing 
out to sea and were immediately captured. One of 
these was a very important vessel, for it not only 
carried a valuable cargo, but a number of passen- 
gers, many of them people of note, who were on 
their way to England. One of these was a Mr. 
Wragg, who was a member of the Council of the 
Province. It might have been supposed that when 
Blackbeard took possession of this ship, he would 
have been satisfied with the cargo and the money 
which he found on board, and having no use for 
prominent citizens, would have let them go their 
way ; but he was a trader as well as a plunderer, 
and he therefore determined that the best thing to 
do in this case was to put an assorted lot of highly 
respectable passengers upon the market and see 
what he could get for them. He was not at the 
time in need of money or provisions, but his men 
were very much in want of medicines, so he decided 
to trade off his prisoners for pills, potions, plasters, 
and all sorts of apothecary's supplies. 

He put three of his pirates in a boat, and with 
them one of the passengers, a Mr. Marks, who was 
commissioned as Blackbeard's special agent, with 



BLACKBEARD COMES ON THE STAGE 135 

orders to inform the Governor that if he did not 
immediately send the medicines required, amount- 
ing in value to about three hundred pounds, and 
if he did not allow the pirate crew of the boat to 
return in safety, every one of the prisoners would 
be hanged from the yard-arm of his ship. 

The boat rowed away to the distant town, and 
Blackbeard waited two days for its return, and 
then he grew very angry, for he believed that his 
messengers had been taken into custody, and he 
came very near hanging Mr. Wragg and all his 
companions. But before he began to satisfy his 
vengeance, news came from the boat. It had been 
upset in the bay, and had had great trouble in 
getting to Charles Town, but it had arrived there 
at last. Blackbeard now waited a day or two 
longer ; but as no news came from Mr. Marks, he 
vowed he would not be trifled with by the impu- 
dent people of Charles Town, and swore that every 
man, woman, and child among the prisoners should 
immediately prepare to be hanged. 

Of course the unfortunate prisoners in the pirate 
ship were in a terrible state of mind during the ab- 
sence of Mr. Marks. They knew very well that 



136 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

they could expect no mercy from Blackbeard if the 
errand should be unsuccessful, and they also knew 
that the Charles Town people would not be likely 
to submit to such an outrageous demand upon 
them ; so they trembled and quaked by day and 
by night, and when at last they were told to get 
ready to be hanged, every particle of courage left 
them, and they proposed to Blackbeard that if he 
would spare their lives, and that if it should turn 
out that their fellow-citizens had decided to sacri- 
fice them for the sake of a few paltry drugs, they 
would take up the cause of the pirates ; they would 
show Blackbeard the best way to sail into the har- 
bor, and they would join with him and his men in 
attacking the city and punishing the inhabitants 
for their hard-hearted treatment of their unfor- 
tunate fellow-citizens. 

This proposition pleased Blackbeard immensely ; 
it would have been like a new game to take Mr. 
Wragg to the town and make him fight his fellow- 
members of the Council of the Province, and so he 
rescinded * his order for a general execution, and 
bade his prisoners pfrepare to join with his pirates 

1 Rescinded, cancelled, countermanded. 



BLACKBEARD COMES ON THE STAGE 137 

when he should give the word for an assault upon 
their city. 

In the meantime there was a terrible stir in 
Charles Town. When the Governor and citizens 
received the insolent and brutal message of Black- 
beard, they were filled with rage as well as conster- 
nation, and if there had been any way of going out 
to sea to rescue their unhappy fellow-citizens, every 
able-bodied man in the town would have enlisted 
in the expedition. But they had no vessels of war, 
and they were not even in a position to arm any of 
the merchantmen in the harbor. It seemed to the 
Governor and his council that there was nothing 
for them to do but to submit to the demands of 
Blackbeard, for they very.well knew that he was a 
scoundrel who would keep his word, and also that 
whatever they did must be done quickly, for there 
were the three swaggering pirates in the town, 
strutting about the streets as if they owned the 
place. If this continued much longer, it would be 
impossible to keep the infuriated citizens from fall- 
ing upon these blustering rascals and bringing their 
impertinence to a summary end. If this should 
happen, it would be a terrible thing ; for not only 



138 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

would Mr. Wragg and his companions be put to 
death, but the pirates would undoubtedly attack the 
town, which was in a very poor position for defence. 
Consequently the drugs were collected with all 
possible haste, and Mr. Marks and the pirates were 
sent with them to Blackbeard. We do not know 
whether or not that bedizened * cutthroat was sat- 
isfied with the way things turned out ; for, having 
had the idea of going to Charles Town and obliging 
the prisoners to help him confiscate the drugs and 
chemicals, he may have preferred this unusual pro- 
ceeding to a more commonplace transaction ; but 
as the medicine had arrived he accepted it, and 
having secured all possible booty and money from 
the ships he had captured, and having stripped his 
prisoners of the greater part of their clothing, he 
set them on shore to walk to Charles Town as well 
as they could. They had a miserably difficult 
time, making their way through the woods and 
marshes, for there were women and children among 
them who were scarcely equal to the journey. 
One of the children was a little boy, the son of Mr. 
Wragg, who afterward became a very prominent 

1 Bedizened, adorned in bad taste. 



BLACKBEARD COMES ON THE STAGE 139 

man in the colonies. He rose to such a high 
position, not only among his countrymen, but in 
the opinion of the English government, that when 
he died, about the beginning of the Revolution, a 
tablet to his memory was placed in Westminster 
Abbey, which is, perhaps, the first instance of such 
an honor being paid to an American. 

Having now provided himself with medicines 
enough to keep his wild crew in good physical 
condition, no matter how much they might feast 
and frolic on the booty they had obtained from 
Charles Town, Blackbeard sailed back to his North 
Carolina haunts and took a long vacation, during 
which time he managed to put himself on very good 
terms with the Governor and officials of the coun- 
try. He had plenty of money and was willing to 
spend it, and so he was allowed to do pretty much 
as he pleased, provided he kept his purse open and 
did not steal from his neighbors. 

But Blackbeard became tired of playing the part 
of a make-believe respectable citizen, and having 
spent the greater part of his money, he wanted to 
make some more. Consequently he fitted out a 
small vessel, and declaring that he was going on a 



140 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

legitimate commercial cruise, he took out regular 
papers for a port in the West Indies and sailed 
away, as if he had been a mild-mannered New Eng- 
land mariner going to catch codfish. The officials 
of the town of Bath, from which he sailed, came 
down to the ship and shook hands with him and 
hoped he would have good success. 

After a moderate absence he returned to Bath, 
bringing with him a large French merchant vessel, 
with no people on board, but loaded with a valu- 
able cargo of sugar and other goods. This vessel 
he declared he had found deserted at sea, and he 
therefore claimed it as a legitimate prize. Know- 
ing the character of this bloody pirate, and know- 
ing how very improbable it was that the' captain 
and all the crew of a valuable merchant vessel, with 
nothing whatever the matter with her, would go 
out into their boats and row away, leaving their 
ship to become the property of any one who might 
happen along, it may seem surprising that the 
officials of Bath appeared to have no doubt of the 
truth of Blackbeard's story, and allowed him freely 
to land the cargo on the French ship and store it 
away as his own property. 



BLACKBEARD COMES ON THE STAGE 141 

But people who consort with pirates cannot be 
expected to have very lively consciences, and al- 
though there must have been persons in the town 
with intelligence enough to understand the story of 
pitiless murder told by that empty vessel, whose 
very decks and masts must have been regarded as 
silent witnesses that her captain and crew did not 
leave her of their own free will, few in the town 
interfered with the thrifty Blackbeard or caused 
any public suspicion to fall upon the propriety of 
his actions. 



CHAPTER XII 
A True-hearted Sailor draws his Sword 

FEELING now quite sure that he could do 
what he pleased on shore as well as at sea, 
Blackbeard swore more, swaggered more, 
and whenever he felt like it, sailed up and down the 
coast and took a prize or two to keep the pot boil- 
ing for himself and his men. 

On one of these expeditions he went to Philadel- 
phia, and, having landed, he walked about to see 
what sort of a place it was, but the Governor of the 
state, hearing of his arrival, quickly arranged to let 
him know that the Quaker city allowed no black- 
hearted pirate, with a ribbon-bedecked beard, to 
promenade on Chestnut and Market streets, and 
promptly issued a warrant for the sea-robber's 
arrest. But Blackbeard was too sharp and too old 
a criminal to be caught in that way, and he left 
the city with great despatch. 

The people along the coast of North Carolina 

142 



A SAILOR DRAWS HIS SWORD 143 

became very tired of Blackbeard and his men. All 
sorts of depredations were committed on vessels, 
large and small, and whenever a ship was boarded 
and robbed, or whenever a fishing-vessel was laid 
under contribution, Blackbeard was known to be at 
the bottom of the business, whether he personally 
appeared or not. To have this busy pirate for a 
neighbor was extremely unpleasant, and the North 
Carolina settlers greatly longed to get rid of him. 
It was of no use for them to ask their own State 
Government to suppress this outrageous scoundrel, 
and although their good neighbor, South Carolina, 
might have been willing to help them, she was too 
poor at that time and had enough to do to take care 
of herself. 

Not knowing, or not caring for the strong feel- 
ing of the settlers against him, Blackbeard con- 
tinued in his wicked ways, and among other crimes 
he captured a small vessel and treated the crew in 
such a cruel and atrocious manner that the bet- 
ter class of North Carolinians vowed they would 
stand him no longer, and they therefore applied to 
Governor Spotswood, of Virginia, and asked his aid 
in putting down the pirates. The Virginians were 



144 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

very willing to do what they could for their unfor- 
tunate neighbors. The legislature offered a reward 
for the capture of Blackbeard or any of his men ; 
but the Governor, feeling that this was not enough, 
determined to do something on his own responsibil- 
ity, for he knew very well that the time might come 
when the pirate vessels would begin to haunt 
Virginia waters. 

There happened to be at that time two small 
British men-of-war in Hampton Roads, but since 
the Governor had no authority to send these after 
the pirates, he fitted out two sloops at his own 
expense and manned them with the best fighting 
men from the war- vessels. One of the sloops he 
put under Captain Brand, and the other under 
Captain Maynard, both brave and experienced 
naval officers. All preparations were made with 
the greatest secrecy — for if Blackbeard had heard 
of what was going on, he would probably have 
decamped — and then the two sloops went out to 
sea with a commission from the Governor to cap- 
ture Blackbeard, dead or alive. This was a pretty 
heavy contract, but Brand and Maynard were 
courageous men and did not hesitate to take it. 



A SAILOR DRAWS HIS SWORD 145 

The Virginians had been informed that the 
pirate captain and his men were on a vessel in 
Ocracoke Inlet, and when they arrived, they 
found, to their delight, that Blackbeard was there. 
When the pirates saw the two armed vessels sailing 
into the inlet, they knew very well that they were 
about to be attacked, and it did not take them long 
to get ready for a fight, nor did they wait to see 
what their enemy was about to do. As soon as 
the sloops were near enough, Blackbeard, without 
waiting for any preliminary exercises, such as a 
demand for surrender or any nonsense of that sort, 
let drive at the intruders with eight heavily loaded 
cannon. 

Now the curtain had been rung up, and the play 
began, and a very lively play it was. The guns 
of the Virginians blazed away at the pirate ship, 
and they would have sent out boats to board her 
had not Blackbeard forestalled them. Boarding 
was always a favorite method of fighting with the 
pirates. They did not often carry heavy cannon, 
and even when they did, they had but little fancy 
for battles at long distances. What they liked was 
to meet foes face to face and cut them down on 



146 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

their own decks. In such combats they felt at 
home, and were almost always successful, for there 
were few mariners or sailors, even in the British 
navy, who could stand against these brawny, glar- 
ing-eyed dare-devils, who sprang over the sides of 
a' vessel like panthers, and fought like bulldogs. 
Blackbeard had had enough cannonading, and he 
did not wait to be boarded. Springing into a 
boat with about twenty of his men, he rowed to 
the vessel commanded by Maynard, and in a few 
minutes he and his pirates surged on board 
her. 

Now there followed on the decks of that sloop 
one of the most fearful hand-to-hand combats 
known to naval history. Pirates had often 
attacked vessels where they met' with strong resis- 
tance, but never had a gang of sea-robbers fallen 
in with such bold and skilled antagonists as those 
who now confronted Blackbeard and his crew. 
At it they went, — cut, fire, slash, bang, howl, and 
shout. Steel clashed, pistols blazed, smoke went 
up, and blood ran down, and it was hard in 
the confusion for a man to tell friend from foe. 
Blackbeard was everywhere, bounding from 



A SAILOR DRAWS HIS SWORD 147 

side to side, as he swung his cutlass high and 
low, and though many a shot was fired at him, 
and many a rush made in his direction, every now 
and then a sailor went down beneath his whirling 
blade. 

But the great pirate had not boarded that ship 
to fight with common men. He was looking for 
Maynard, the commander. Soon he met him, 
and for the first time in his life he found his match. 
Maynard was a practised swordsman, and no mat- 
ter how hard and how swiftly came down the cut- 
lass of the pirate, his strokes were always evaded, 
and the sword of the Virginian played more dan- 
gerously near him. At last Blackbeard, finding 
that he could not cut down his enemy, suddenly 
drew a pistol, and was about to empty its barrels 
into the very face of his opponent, when Maynard 
sent his sword-blade into the throat of the furious 
pirate ; the great Blackbeard went down upon his 
back on the deck, and in the next moment May- 
nard put an end to his nefarious x career. Their 
leader dead, the few pirates who were left alive 
gave up the fight, and sprang overboard, hoping 

1 Nefarious, very bad. 



148 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

to be able to swim ashore, and the victory of the 
Virginians was complete. 

The strength, toughness, and extraordinary 
vitality of these feline human beings, who were 
known as pirates, has often occasioned astonish- 
ment in ordinary people. Their sun-tanned and 
hairy bodies seemed to be made of something like 
wire, leather, and India rubber, upon which the 
most tremendous exertions, and even the infliction 
of severe wounds, made but little impression. 
Before Blackbeard fell, he received from Maynard 
and others no less than twenty-five wounds, 
and yet he fought fearlessly to the last, and 
when the panting officer sheathed his sword, he 
felt that he had performed a most signal deed of 
valor. 

When they had broken up the pirate nest in 
Ocracoke Inlet, the two sloops sailed to Bath, 
where they compelled some of the unscrupulous 
town officials to surrender the cargo which had 
been stolen from the French vessel and stored 
in the town by Blackbeard; then they sailed 
proudly back to Hampton Roads, with the head 
of the dreaded Blackbeard dangling from the end 



A SAILOR DRAWS HIS SWORD 149 

of the bowsprit of the vessel he had boarded, and 
on whose deck he had discovered the fact, before 
unknown to him, that a well-trained, honest man 
can fight as well as the most reckless cutthroat who 
ever decked his beard with ribbons, and swcre 
enmity to all things good. 



CHAPTER XIII 
A Greenhorn under the Black Flag 

EARLY in the eighteenth century there lived 
at Bridgetown, in the island of Barbadoes, 1 
a very pleasant, middle-aged gentleman 
named Major Stede Bonnet. He was a man in 
comfortable circumstances, and had been an officer 
in the British army. He had retired from military 
service, and had bought an estate at Bridgetown, 
where he lived in comfort and was respected by his 
neighbors. 

But for some reason or other this quiet and repu- 
table gentleman got it into his head that he would 
like to be a pirate. There were some persons who 
said that this strange fancy was due to the fact 
that his wife did not make his home pleasant for 
him, but it is quite certain that if a man wants an 
excuse for robbing and murdering his fellow-beings, 
he ought to have a much better one than the bad 
temper of his wife. But besides the general rea- 

1 Barbadoes. See map. 
150 



GREENHORN UNDER THE BLACK FLAG 151 

sons why Major Bonnet should not become a pi- 
rate, and which applied to all men as well as him- 
self, there was a special reason against his adoption 
of the profession of a sea-robber, for he was an out- 
and-out landsman and knew nothing whatever of 
nautical matters. He had been at sea but very 
little, and if he had heard a boatswain order his 
man to furl the keel, to batten down the shrouds, or 
to hoist the forechains to the topmast yard, he 
would have seen nothing out of the way in these 
commands. He was very fond of history, and 
very well read in the literature of the day. He was 
accustomed to the habits of good society, and 
knew a great deal about farming and horses, cows 
and poultry, but if he had been compelled to steer 
a vessel, he would not have known how to keep her 
bow ahead of her stern. 

But notwithstanding this absolute incapacity for 
such a life, and the absence of any of the ordinary 
motives for abandoning respectability and enter- 
ing upon a career of crime, Major Bonnet was deter- 
mined to become a pirate, and he became one. 
He had money enough to buy a ship and to fit her 
out and man her, and this he quietly did at Bridge- 



152 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

town, nobody supposing that he was going to do 
anything more than start off on some commercial 
cruise. When everything was ready, his vessel 
slipped out of the harbor one night, and after he 
was sailing safely on the rolling sea he stood upon 
the quarterdeck and proclaimed himself a pirate. 
It might not be supposed that this was necessary, 
for the seventy men on board his ship were all 
desperate cutthroats, of various nationalities, 
whom he had found in the little port, and who knew 
very well what was expected of them when they 
reached the sea. But if Stede Bonnet had nqt 
proclaimed himself a pirate, it is possible that he 
might not have believed, himself, that he was one, 
and so he ran up the black flag, with its skeleton 
or skull and cross-bones, he girded on a great cut- 
lass, and, folding his arms, he ordered his mate to 
steer the vessel to the coast of Virginia. 

Although Bonnet knew so little about ships and 
the sea, and had had no experience in piracy, his 
men were practised seamen, and those of them who 
had not been pirates before were quite ready and 
very well fitted to become such; so when this 
green hand came into the waters of Virginia, he 



GREENHORN UNDER THE BLACK FLAG 153 

actually took two or three vessels and robbed them 
of their cargoes, burning the ships, and sending the 
crews on shore. 

This had grown to be a common custom among 
the pirates, who, though cruel and hard-hearted, 
had not the inducements of the old buccaneers to 
torture and murder the crews of the vessels which 
they captured. They could not hate human 
beings in general as the buccaneers hated the 
Spaniards, and so they were a little more humane 
to their prisoners, setting them ashore on some 
island or desert coast, and letting them shift for 
themselves as best they might. This was called 
marooning, and was somewhat less heartless than 
the old methods of getting rid of undesirable 
prisoners by drowning or beheading them. 

As Bonnet had always been rather conventional 
in his ideas and had respected the customs of 
the society in which he found himself, he now 
adopted all the piratical fashions of the day, and 
when he found himself too far from land to put 
the captured crew on shore, he did not hesitate to 
make them "walk the plank," which was a favorite 
device of the pirates whenever they had no other 



154 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

way of disposing of their prisoners. The unfor- 
tunate wretches, with their hands tied behind 
them, were compelled, one by one, to mount a 
plank which was projected over the side of the 
vessel and balanced like a see-saw, and when, 
prodded by knives and cutlasses, they stepped 
out upon this plank, of course it tipped up, and 
down they went into the sea. In this way, men, 
women, and children slipped out of sight among 
the waves as the vessel sailed merrily on. 

In one branch of his new profession Bonnet rap- 
idly became proficient. He was an insatiable 1 
robber and a cruel conqueror. He captured mer- 
chant vessels all along the coast as high up as New 
England, and then he came down again and 
stopped for a while before Charles Town harbor, 
where he took a couple of prizes, and then put into 
one of the North Carolina harbors, where it was 
always easy for a pirate vessel to refit and get 
ready for further adventures. 

Bonnet's vessel was named the Revenge, which 
was about as ill suited to the vessel as her com- 
mander was ill fitted to sail her, for Bonnet had 

1 Insatiable, not to be satisfied, very greedy. 



GREENHORN UNDER THE BLACK FLAG 155 

nobody to revenge himself upon unless, indeed, it 
were his scolding wife. But a good many pirate 
ships were then called the Revenge, and Bonnet was 
bound to follow the fashion, whatever it might be. 
Very soon after he had stood upon the quarter- 
deck and proclaimed himself a pirate his men had 
discovered that he knew no more about sailing 
than he knew about painting portraits, and 
although there were under-officers who directed 
all the nautical operations, the mass of the crew 
conceived a great contempt for a landsman cap- 
tain. There was much grumbling and growling, 
and many of the men would have been glad to 
throw Bonnet overboard and take the ship into 
their own hands. But when any symptoms of 
mutiny showed themselves, the pirates found that 
although they did not have a sailor in command 
over them, they had a very determined and 
relentless master. Bonnet knew that the captain 
of a pirate ship ought to be the most severe and 
rigid man on board, and so, at the slightest sign of 
insubordination, his grumbling men were put in 
chains or flogged, and it was Bonnet's habit at such 
times to strut about the deck with loaded pistols, 



156 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 




GREENHORN UNDER THE BLACK FLAG 157 

threatening to blow out the brains of any man who 
dared to disobey him. Recognizing that although 
their captain was no sailor he was a first-class 
tyrant, the rebellious crew kept their grumbling to 
themselves and worked his ship. 

Bonnet now pointed the bow of the Revenge 
southward — that is, he requested somebody else 
to see that it was done — and sailed to the Bay 
of Honduras, which was a favorite resort of the 
pirates about that time. And here it was that he 
first met with the famous Captain Blackbeard. 
There can be no doubt that our amateur pirate was 
very glad indeed to become acquainted with this 
well-known professional, and they soon became 
good friends. Blackbeard was on the point of 
organizing an expedition, and he proposed that 
Bonnet and his vessel should join it. This invita- 
tion was gladly accepted, and the two pirate 
captains started out on a cruise together. Now 
the old reprobate, 1 Blackbeard, knew everything 
about ships and was a good navigator, and it was 
not long before he discovered that his new partner 
was as green as grass in regard to all nautical af- 

1 Reprobate, thoroughly bad person. 



158 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

fairs. Consequently, after having thought the 
matter over for a time, he made up his mind that 
Bonnet was not at all fit to command such a fine 
vessel as the one he owned and had fitted out, and 
as pirates make their own laws, and perhaps do not 
obey them if they happen not to feel like it, Black- 
beard sent for Bonnet to come on board his ship, 
and then, in a manner as cold-blooded as if he had 
been about to cut down a helpless prisoner, Black- 
beard told Bonnet that he was not fit to be a pirate 
captain, that he intended to keep him on board his 
own vessel, and that he would send somebody to 
take charge of the Revenge. 

This was a fall indeed, and Bonnet was almost 
stunned by it. An hour before he had been 
proudly strutting about on the deck of a vessel 
which belonged to him, and in which he had cap- 
tured many valuable prizes, and now he was told 
he was to stay on Blackbeard's ship and make 
himself useful in keeping the log book, or in 
doing any other easy thing which he might happen 
to understand. The green pirate ground his teeth 
and swore bitterly inside of himself, but he said 
nothing openly; on Blackbeard's ship Black- 
beard's decisions were not to be questioned. 



CHAPTER XIV 
Bonnet again to the Front 

IT must not be supposed that the late com- 
mander of the Revenge continued to be satis- 
fied, as he sat in the cabin of Blackbeard's 
vessel and made the entries of the day's sailing 
and various performances. He obeyed the orders 
of his usurping partner because he was obliged to 
do so, but he did not hate Blackbeard any the less 
because he had to keep quiet about it. He accom- 
panied his pirate chief on various cruises, among 
which was the famous expedition to the harbor 
of Charles Town where Blackbeard traded Mr. 
Wragg and his companions for medicines. 

Having a very fine fleet under him, Blackbeard 
did a very successful business for some time, but 
feeling that he had earned enough for the present, 
and that it was time for him to take one of his 
vacations, he put into an inlet in North Carolina, 
where he disbanded his crew. So long as he was on 

159 



160 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

shore spending his money and having a good time, 
he did not want to have a lot of men about him 
who would look to him to support them when 
they had spent their portion of the spoils. Hav- 
ing no further use for Bonnet, he dismissed him 
also, and did not object to his resuming possession 
of his own vessel. If the green pirate chose to go 
to sea again and perhaps drown himself and his 
crew, it was a matter of no concern to Blackbeard. 
But this was a matter of very great concern to 
Stede Bonnet, and he proceeded to prove that 
there were certain branches of the piratical busi- 
ness in which he was an adept, and second to 
none of his fellow-practitioners. He wished to 
go pirating again, and saw a way of doing this 
which he thought would be far superior to any of 
the common methods. It was about this time 
that King George of England, very desirous of 
breaking up piracy, issued a proclamation in 
which he promised pardon to any pirate who 
would appear before the proper authorities, 
renounce his evil practices, and take an oath of 
allegiance. It also happened that very soon after 
this proclamation had been issued, England went 



BONNET AGAIN TO THE FRONT 161 

to war with Spain. Being a man who kept him- 
self posted in the news of the world, so far as it 
was possible, Bonnet saw in the present state of 
affairs a very good chance for him to play the 
part of a wolf in sheep's clothing, and he pro- 
ceeded to begin his new piratical career by renounc- 
ing piracy. So leaving the Revenge in the inlet, 
he journeyed overland to Bath; there he signed 
pledges, took oaths, and did everything that was 
necessary to change himself from a pirate captain 
to a respectable commander of a duly authorized 
British privateer. Returning to his vessel with 
all the papers in his pocket necessary to prove 
that he was a loyal and law-abiding subject of 
Great Britain, he took out regular clearance papers 
for St. Thomas, which was a British naval station, 
and where he declared he was going in order to 
obtain a commission as a privateer. 

Now the wily Bonnet had everything he wanted 
except a crew. Of course it would not do for 
him, in his present respectable capacity, to go 
about enlisting unemployed pirates, but at this 
point fortune again favored him; he knew of a 
desert island not very far away where Blackbeard, 



162 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

at the end of his last cruise, had marooned a 
large party of his men. This heartless pirate had 
not wanted to take all of his followers into 
port, because they might prove troublesome and 
expensive to him, and so he had put a number 
of them on this island, to live or die as the case 
might be. Bonnet went over to this island, 
and finding the greater part of these men still 
surviving, he offered to take them to St. Thomas 
in his vessel if they would agree to work the ship 
to port. This proposition was of course joyfully 
accepted, and very soon the Revenge was manned 
with a complete crew of competent desperadoes. 

All these operations took a good deal of time, 
and, at last, when everything was ready for 
Bonnet to start out on his piratical cruise, he 
received information which caused him to change 
his mind, and to set forth on an errand of a very 
different kind. He had supposed that Blackbeard, 
whom he had never forgiven for the shameful and 
treacherous manner in which he had treated him, 
was still on shore enjoying himself, but he was 
told by the captain of a small trading vessel that 
the old pirate was preparing for another cruise, 



BONNET AGAIN TO THE FRONT 163 

and that he was then in Ocracoke Inlet. Now 
Bonnet folded his arms and stamped his feet upon 
the quarter-deck. The time had come for him 
to show that the name of his vessel meant some- 
thing. Never before had he had an opportunity 
for revenging himself on anybody, but now that 
hour had arrived. He would revenge himself 
upon Blackbeard ! 

The implacable Bonnet sailed out to sea in a 
truly warlike frame of mind. He was not going 
forth to prey upon unresisting merchantmen ; he 
was on his way to punish a black-hearted pirate, a 
faithless scoundrel, who had not only acted 
knavishly toward the world in general, but had 
behaved most disloyally and disrespectfully to- 
ward a fellow pirate chief. If he could once run 
the Revenge alongside the ship of the perfidious 
Blackbeard, he would show him what a green 
hand could do. 

When Bonnet reached Ocracoke Inlet, he was 
deeply disappointed to find that Blackbeard had 
left that harbor, but he did not give up the pur- 
suit. He made hot chase after the vessel of his 
pirate enemy, keeping a sharp lookout in hopes 



164 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

of discovering some signs of him. If the enraged 
Bonnet could have met the ferocious Blackbeard 
face to face, there might have been a combat 
which would have relieved the world of two 
atrocious 1 villains, and Captain Maynard would 
have been deprived of the honpr of having slain 
the most famous pirate of the day. 

Bonnet was a good soldier and a brave man, 
and, although he could not sail a ship, he under- 
stood the use of the sword even better, perhaps, 
than Blackbeard, and there is good reason to be- 
lieve that if the two ships had come together, their 
respective crews would have allowed their cap- 
tains to fight out their private quarrel without 
interference, for pirates delight in a bloody spec- 
tacle, and this would have been to them a rare 
diversion of the kind. 

But Bonnet never overtook Blackbeard, and 
the great combat between the rival pirates did not 
take place. After vainly searching for a consider- 
able time for a trace or sight of Blackbeard, the 
baffled Bonnet gave up the pursuit and turned his 
mind to other objects. The first thing he did was 

1 Atrocious, terribly wicked. 



BONNET AGAIN TO THE FRONT 165 

to change the name of his vessel ; if he could not 
be revenged, he would not sail in the Revenge. 
Casting about in his mind for a good name, he 
decided to call her the Royal James. Having no 
intention of respecting his oaths or of keeping his 
promises, he thought that, as he was going to be 
disloyal, he might as well be as disloyal as he 
could, and so he gave his ship the name assumed 
by the son of James the Second, who was a pre- 
tender to the throne, and was then in France 
plotting against the English government. 

The next thing he did was to change his own 
name, for he thought this would make matters 
better for him if he should be captured after 
entering upon his new criminal career. So he 
called himself Captain Thomas, by which name 
he was afterwards known. 

When these preliminaries had been arranged, 
he gathered his crew together and announced that 
instead of going to St. Thomas to get a commission 
as a privateer, he had determined to keep on in his 
old manner of life, and that he wished them to 
understand that not only was he a pirate captain, 
but that they were a pirate crew. Many of the 



166 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

men were very much surprised at this announce- 
ment, for they had thought it a very natural thing 
for the green-hand Bonnet to give up pirating 
after he had been so thoroughly snubbed by 
Blackbeard, and they had not supposed that he 
would ever think again of sailing under a black 
flag. 

However, the crew's opinion of the green-hand 
captain had been a good deal changed. In his 
various cruises he had learned a good deal about 
navigation, and could now give very fair orders, 
and his furious pursuit of Blackbeard had also 
given him a reputation for reckless bravery which 
he had not enjoyed before. A man who was 
chafing and fuming for a chance of a hand-to- 
hand conflict with the greatest pirate of the day 
must be a pretty good sort of a fellow from their 
point of view. Moreover, their strutting and 
stalking captain, so recently balked of his dark 
revenge, was a very savage-looking man, and it 
would not be pleasant either to try to persuade 
him to give up his piratical intention, or to decline 
to join him in carrying it out ; so the whole of the 
crew, minor officers and men, changed their minds 



BONNET AGAIN TO THE FRONT 167 

about going to St. Thomas, and agreed to hoist 
the skull and cross bones, and to follow Captain 
Bonnet wherever he might lead. 

Bonnet now cruised about in grand style and 
took some prizes on the Virginia coast, and then 
went up into Delaware Bay, where he captured 
such ships as he wanted, and acted generally in 
the most domineering and insolent fashion. Once, 
when he stopped near the town of Lewes, in order 
to send some prisoners ashore, he sent a message 
to the officers of the town to the effect that if they 
interfered with his men when they came ashore, 
he would open fire upon the town with his cannon, 
and blow every house into splinters. Of course 
the citizens, having no way of defending them- 
selves, were obliged to allow the pirates to come 
on shore and depart unmolested. 

Then after this the blustering captain captured 
two valuable sloops, and wishing to take them 
along with him without the trouble of transferring 
their cargoes to his own vessel, he left their crews 
on board, and ordered them to follow him wher- 
ever he went. Some days after that, when one 
of the vessels seemed to be sailing at too great a 



168 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

distance, Bonnet quickly let her captain know 
that he was not a man to be trifled with,, and sent 
him the message that if he did not keep close to 
the Royal James, he would fire into him and sink 
him to the bottom. 

After a time Bonnet put into a North Carolina 
port in order to repair the Royal James, which was 
becoming very leaky, and seeing no immediate 
legitimate way of getting planks and beams 
enough with which to make the necessary repairs, 
he captured a small sloop belonging in the neigh- 
borhood, and broke it up in order to get the 
material he needed to make his own vessel sea- 
worthy. 

Now the people of the North Carolina coast 
very seldom interfered with pirates, as we have 
seen, and it is likely that Bonnet might have 
stayed in port as long as he pleased, and repaired 
and refitted his vessel without molestation if he 
had bought and paid for the planks and timber 
he required. But when it came to boldly seizing 
their property, that was too much even for the 
people of the region, and complaints of Bonnet's 
behavior spread from settlement to settlement, 



BONNET AGAIN TO THE FRONT 169 

and it very soon became known all down the 
coast that there was a pirate in North Carolina 
who was committing depredations there and was 
preparing to set out on a fresh cruise. 

When these tidings came to Charles Town, the 
citizens were thrown into great agitation. It had 
not been long since Blackbeard had visited their 
harbor, and had treated them with such brutal 
insolence, and there were bold spirits in the town 
who declared that if any effort by them could 
prevent another visitation of the pirates, that ef- 
fort should be made. There was no naval force 
in the harbor which could be sent out to meet the 
pirates, who were coming down the coast; but 
Mr. William Rhett, a private gentleman of posi- 
tion in the place, went to the Governor and offered 
to fit out, at his own expense, an expedition for 
the purpose of turning away from their city the 
danger which threatened it. 



CHAPTER XV 
The Battle of the Sand-bars 

WHEN that estimable private gentleman, 
Mr. William Rhett, of Charles Town, 
had received a commission from the 
Governor to go forth on his own responsibility 
and meet the dreaded pirate, the news of whose 
depredations had thrown the good citizens into 
such a fever of apprehension, he took possession, 
in the name of the law, of two large sloops, the 
Henry and the Sea-Nymph, which were in the 
harbor, and at his own expense he manned them 
with well-armed crews, and put on board of each 
of them eight small cannon. When everything 
was ready, Mr. Rhett was in command of a very 
formidable force for those waters, and if he had 
been ready to sail a few days sooner, he would 
have had an opportunity of giving his men some 
practice in fighting pirates before they met the 
particular and more important sea-robber whom 

170 



THE BATTLE OF THE SAND-BARS 171 

they had set out to encounter. Just as his vessel 
was ready to sail, Mr. Rhett received news that 
a pirate ship had captured two or three mer- 
chantmen just outside the harbor, and he put out 
to sea with all possible haste and cruised up and 
down the coast for some time, but he did not find 
this most recent depredator, 1 who had departed 
very promptly when he heard that armed ships 
were coming out of the harbor. 

Now Mr. Rhett, who was no more of a sailor 
than Stede Bonnet had been when he first began 
his seafaring life, boldly made his way up the 
coast to the mouth of Cape Fear River where he 
had been told the pirate vessel was lying. When 
he reached his destination, Mr. Rhett found that 
it would not be an easy thing to ascend the river, 
for the reason that the pilots he had brought 
with him knew nothing about the waters of that 
part of the coast, and although the two ships 
made their way very cautiously, it was not long 
after they had entered the river before they got 
out of the channel, and it being low tide, both of 
them ran aground upon sand bars. 

1 Depredator, robber. 



172 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

This was a very annoying accident, but it was 
not disastrous, for the sailing masters who com- 
manded the sloops knew very well that when the 
tide rose, their vessels would float again. But 
it prevented Mr. Rhett from going on and making 
an immediate attack upon the pirate vessel, the 
topmasts of which could be plainly seen behind 
a high headland some distance up the river. 

Of course Bonnet, or Captain Thomas, as he 
now chose to be called, soon became aware of the 
fact that two good-sized vessels were lying aground 
near the mouth of the river, and having a very 
natural curiosity to see what sort of craft they 
were, he waited until nightfall and then sent 
three armed boats to make observations. When 
these boats returned to the Royal James and 
reported that the grounded vessels were not well- 
loaded trading craft, but large sloops full of men 
and armed with cannon, Bonnet (for we prefer 
to call him by his old name) had good reason to 
fold his arms, knit his brows, and strut up and 
down the deck. He was sure that the armed 
vessels came from Charles Town, and there was 
no reason to doubt that if the Governor of South 



THE BATTLE OF THE SAND-BARS 173 

Carolina had sent two ships against him the 
matter was a very serious one. He was penned 
up in the river, he had only one fighting vessel to 
contend against two, and if he could not succeed 
in getting out to sea before he should be attacked 
by the Charles Town ships, there would be but 
little chance of his continuing in his present line 
of business. If the Royal James had been ready 
to sail, there is no doubt that Bonnet would have 
taken his chance of finding the channel in the 
dark, and would have sailed away that night 
without regard to the cannonading which might 
have been directed against him from the two 
stranded vessels. 

But as it was impossible to get ready to sail, 
Bonnet went to work with the greatest energy to 
get ready to fight. He knew that when the tide 
rose there would be two armed sloops afloat, and 
that there would be a regular naval battle on the 
quiet waters of Cape Fear River. All night his 
men worked to clear the decks and get everything 
in order for the coming combat, and all night Mr. 
Rhett and his crew kept a sharp watch for any 
unexpected move of the enemy, while they loaded 



174 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

their guns, their pistols, and their cannon, and put 
everything in order for action. 

Very early in the morning the wide-awake crews 
of the South Carolina vessels, which were now 
afloat and at anchor, saw that the topmasts of 
the pirate craft were beginning to move above the 
distant headland, and very soon Bonnet's ship 
came out into view, under full sail, and as she 
veered around they saw that she was coming 
toward them. Up went the anchors and up went 
the sails of the Henry and the Sea-Nymph, and 
the naval battle between the retired army officer 
who had almost learned to be a sailor, and the 
private gentleman from South Carolina, who 
knew nothing whatever about managing ships, 
was about to begin. 

It was plain to the South Carolinians that the 
great object of the pirate captain was to get out 
to sea just as soon as he could, and that he was 
coming down the river, not because he wished 
to make an immediate attack upon them, but 
because he hoped to slip by them and get away. 
Of course they could follow him upon the ocean 
and fight him if their vessels were fast enough, but 



THE BATTLE OF THE SAND-BARS 175 

once out of the river with plenty of sea-room, he 
would have twenty chances of escape where now 
he had one. 

But Mr. Rhett did not intend that the pirates 
should play him this little trick; he wanted to 
fight the dastardly wretches in the river, where 
they could not get away, and he had no idea of 
letting them sneak out to sea. Consequently 
as the Royal James, under full sail, was making 
her way down the river, keeping as far as possible 
from her two enemies, Mr. Rhett ordered his ships 
to bear down upon her so as to cut off her retreat 
and force her toward the opposite shore of the 
river. This manoeuvre was performed with great 
success. The two Charles Town sloops sailed 
so boldly and swiftly toward the Royal James that 
the latter was obliged to hug the shore, and the 
first thing the pirates knew they were stuck fast 
and tight upon a sand-bar. Three minutes after- 
ward the Henry ran upon a sand-bar, and there 
being enough of these obstructions in that river 
to satisfy any ordinary demand, the Sea-Nymph 
very soon grounded herself upon another of them. 
But unfortunately she took up her permanent 



176 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

position at a considerable distance from her 
consort. 

Here now were the vessels which were to con- 
duct this memorable sea-fight, all three fast in the 
sand and unable to move, and their predicament 
was made the worse by the fact that it would be 
five hours before the tide would rise high enough 
for any one of them to float. The positions of the 
three vessels were very peculiar and awkward; 
the Henry and the Royal James were lying so 
near to each other that Mr. Rhett could have 
shot Major Bonnet with a pistol if the latter 
gentleman had given him the chance, and the 
Sea-Nymph was so far away that she was entirely 
out of the fight, and her crew could do nothing 
but stand and watch what was going on between 
the other two vessels. 

But although they could not get any nearer each 
other, nor get away from each other, the pirates 
and Mr. Rhett's crew had no idea of postponing 
the battle until they should be afloat and able to 
fight in the ordinary fashion of ships ; they imme- 
diately began to fire at each other with rjistols, 
muskets, and cannon, and the din and roar was 



THE BATTLE OF. THE SAND-BARS 177 

something that must have astonished the birds 
and beasts and fishes of that quiet region. 

As the tide continued to run out of the river, 
and its waters became more and more shallow, 
the two contending vessels began to careen l over 
to one side, and, unfortunately for the Henry, 
they both careened in the same direction, and in 
such a manner that the deck of the Royal James 
was inclined away from the Henry, while the deck 
of the latter leaned towards her pirate foe. This 
gave a great advantage to Bonnet and his crew, 
for they were in a great measure protected by the 
hull of their vessel, whereas the whole deck of the 
Henry was exposed to the fire of the pirates. But 
Mr. Rhett and his South Carolinians were all 
brave men, and they blazed away with their 
muskets and pistols at the pirates whenever they 
could see a head above the rail of the Royal James, 
while with their- cannon they kept firing at the 
pirate's hull. 

For five long hours the fight continued, but the 
cannon carried by the two vessels must have been 
of very small calibre, for if they had been firing 

1 Careen, to tip. 



178 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

at such short range and for such a length of time 
with modern guns, they must have shattered each 
other into kindling wood. But neither vessel 
seems to have been seriously injured, and although 
there were a good many men killed on both sides, 
the combat was kept up with great determination 
and fury. At one time it seemed almost certain 
that Bonnet would get the better of Mr. Rhett, 
and he ordered his black flag waved contemptu- 
ously in the air while his men shouted to the 
South Carolinians to come over and call upon 
them, but the South Carolina boys answered these 
taunts with cheers and fired away more furiously 
than ever. 

The tide was now coming in, and everybody on 
board the two fighting vessels knew very well that 
the first one of them which should float would 
have a great advantage over the other, and would 
probably be the conqueror. In came the tide, 
and still the cannons roared and the muskets 
cracked, while the hearts of the pirates and the 
South Carolinians almost stood still as they each 
watched the other vessel to see if she showed any 
signs of floating. 



THE BATTLE OF THE SAND-BARS 179 

At last such signs were seen ; the Henry was 
further from the shore than the Royal James, and 
she first felt the influence of the rising waters. 
Her masts began to straighten, and at last her 
deck was level, and she floated clear of the bottom 
while her antagonist still lay careened over on her 
side. Now the pirates saw there was no chance 
for them ; in a very short time the other Carolina 
sloop would be afloat, and then the two vessels 
would bear down upon them and utterly destroy 
them and their vessel. Consequently upon the 
Royal James there was a general disposition to 
surrender and to make the best terms they could, 
for it would be a great deal better to submit and 
run the chance of a trial than to keep up the fight 
against enemies so much superior both in numbers 
and ships, who would soon be upon them. 

But Bonnet would not listen to one word of 
surrender. Rather than give up the fight he 
declared he would set fire to the powder magazine 
of the Royal James and blow himself, his ship, 
and his men high up into the air. Although he 
had not a sailor's skill, he possessed a soldier's 
soul, and in spite of his being a dastardly and 



180 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

cruel pirate he was a brave man. But Bonnet 
was only one, and his crew numbered dozens, and 
notwithstanding his furiously dissenting voice it 
was determined to surrender, and when Mr. 
Rhett sailed up to the Royal James, intending 
to board her if the pirates still showed resistance, 
he found them ready to submit to terms and to 
yield themselves his prisoners. 

Thus ended the great sea-fight between the 
private gentlemen, and thus ended Stede Bonnet's 
career. He and his men were taken to Charles 
Town, where most of the pirate crew were tried 
and executed. The green-hand pirate, who had 
wrought more devastation along the American 
coast than many a skilled sea-robber, was held 
in custody to await his trial, and it seems very 
strange that there should have been a public 
sentiment in Charles Town which induced the 
officials to treat this pirate with a certain degree 
of respect simply from the fact that his station 
in life had been that of a gentleman. He was a 
much more black-hearted scoundrel than any of 
his men, but they were executed as soon as possible, 
while his trial was postponed and he was allowed 



THE BATTLE OF THE SAND-BARS 181 

privileges which would never have been accorded 
a common pirate. In consequence of this leni- 
ency he escaped and had to be retaken by Mr. 
Rhett. It was so long before he was tried that 
sympathy for his misfortunes iarose among some 
of the tender-hearted citizens of Charles Town 
whose houses he would have pillaged and whose 
families he would have murdered if the exigencies 
of piracy had rendered such action desirable. 

Finding that other people were trying to save his 
life, Bonnet came down from his high horse and 
tried to save it himself by writing piteous letters 
to the Governor, begging for mercy. But the 
Governor of South Carolina had no notion of 
sparing a pirate who had deliberately put himself 
under the protection of the law in order that he 
might better pursue his lawless and wicked career, 
and the green hand, with the black heart, was 
finally hung on the same spot where his compan- 
ions had been executed. 



CHAPTER XVI 
The Story of Two Women Pirates 

THE history of the world gives us many 
instances of women who have taken the 
parts of men, almost always acquitting 
themselves with as much credit as if they had 
really belonged to the male sex, and, in our modern 
days, these instances are becoming more fre- 
quent than ever before. Joan of Arc put on a 
suit of armor and bravely led an army, and there 
have been many other fighting women who made 
a reputation for themselves ; but it is very seldom 
that we hear of a woman who became a pirate. 
There were, however, two women pirates who 
made themselves very well known on our coast. 

The most famous of these women pirates was 
named Mary Reed. Her father was an English 
captain of a trading vessel, and her mother sailed 
with him. This mother had had an elder child, a 
son, and she also had a mother-in-law in England 

182 



THE STORY OF TWO WOMEN PIRATES 183 

from whom she expected great things for her little 
boy. But the boy died, and Mrs. Reed, being 
afraid that her mother-in-law would not be will- 
ing to leave any property to a girl, determined to 
play a little trick, and make believe that her 
second child was also a boy. 

Consequently, as soon as the little girl, who, 
from her birth had been called Mary by her father 
and mother, was old enough to leave off baby 
clothes, she put on boy's clothes, and when the 
family returned to England a nice little boy 
appeared before his grandmother; but all this 
deception amounted to nothing, for the old lady 
died without leaving anything to the pretended 
boy. Mary's mother believed that her child 
would get along better in the world as a boy than 
she would as a girl, and therefore she still dressed 
her in masculine clothes, and put her out to service 
as a foot-boy, or one of those youngsters who now 
go by the name of "Buttons." 

But Mary did not fancy blacking boots and 
running errands. She was very well satisfied to 
be a boy, but she wanted to live the kind of a boy's 
life which would please her fancy, and as she 



184 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

thought life on the ocean wave would suit her very 
well, she ran away from her employer's house 
and enlisted on board a man-of-war as a powder 
monkey. 

After a short time, Mary found that the ocean 
was not all that she expected it to be, and when 
she had grown up so that she looked like a good 
strapping fellow, she ran away from the man- 
of-war when it was in an English port, and went 
to Flanders, and there she thought she would try 
something new, and see whether or not she would 
like a soldier's life better than that of a sailor. 
She enlisted in a regiment of foot and in the course 
of time she became a very good soldier and took 
part in several battles, firing her musket and 
charging with her bayonet as well as any of the 
men beside her. 

But there is a great deal of hard work connected 
with infantry service, and although she was eager 
for the excitement of battle with the exhilarating 
smell of powder and the cheering shouts of her 
fellow-soldiers, Mary did not fancy tramping 
on long marches, carrying her heavy musket and 
knapsack. She got herself changed into a regi- 



THE STORY OF TWO WOMEN PIRATES 185 

ment of cavalry, and here, mounted upon a horse, 
with the encumbrances she disliked to carry com- 
fortably strapped behind her, Mary felt much 
more at ease, and much better satisfied. But 
she was not destined to achieve fame as a dash- 
ing cavalry man with foaming steed and flashing 
sabre. One of her comrades was a very pre- 
possessing young fellow, and Mary fell in love 
with him, and when she told him she was not 
really a cavalry man but a cavalry woman, he 
returned her affection, and the two agreed that 
they would quit the army, and set up domestic 
life as quiet civilians. They were married, and 
went into the tavern-keeping business. They 
were both fond of horses, and did not wish to 
sever all connection with the method of life they 
had just given up, and so they called their little 
inn the Three Horse Shoes, and were always glad 
when any one of their customers came riding up 
to their stables, instead of simply walking in their 
door. 

But this domestic life did not last very long. 
Mary's husband died, and, not wishing to keep a 
tavern by herself, she again put on the dress of a 



186 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

man and enlisted as a soldier. But her military ex- 
perience did not satisfy her, and after all she be- 
lieved that she liked the sea better than the land, 
and again she shipped as a sailor on a vessel bound 
for the West Indies. 

Now Mary's desire for change and variety 
seemed likely to be fully satisfied. The ship was 
taken by English pirates, and as she was English 
and looked as if she would make a good freebooter, 
they compelled her to join them, and thus it was 
that she got her first idea of a pirate's life. When 
this company disbanded, she went to New Provi- 
dence and enlisted on a privateer, but, as was very 
common on such vessels commissioned to perform 
acts of legal piracy, the crew soon determined that 
illegal piracy was much preferable, so they hoisted 
the black flag, and began to scourge the seas. 

Mary Reed was now a regular pirate, with a cut- 
lass, pistol, and every outward appearance of a dar- 
ing sea-robber, except that she wore no bristling 
beard, but as her face was sunburned and seamed 
by the weather, she looked mannish enough to 
frighten the senses out of any unfortunate trader 
on whose deck she bounded in company with her 



THE STORY OF TWO WOMEN PIRATES 187 

shouting, hairy-faced companions. It is told of 
her that she did not fancy the life of a pirate, but 
she seemed to believe in the principle of whatever is 
worth doing is worth doing well ; she was as ready 
with her cutlass and her pistol as any other ocean 
bandit. 

But although Mary was a daring pirate, she was 
also a woman, and again she fell in love. A very 
pleasant and agreeable sailor was taken prisoner by 
the crew of her ship, and Mary concluded that she 
would take him as her portion of the spoils. Con- 
sequently, at the first port they touched she became 
again a woman and married him, and as they had 
no other present method of livelihood he remained 
with her on her ship. Mary and her husband had 
no real love for a pirate's life, and they determined 
to give it up as soon as possible, but the chance to 
do so did not arrive. Mary had a very high regard 
for her new husband, who was a quiet, amiable 
man, and not at all suited to his present life, and 
as he had become a pirate for the love of her, she 
did everything she could to make life easy for him. 

She even went so far as to fight a duel in his 
place, one of the crew having insulted him, prob- 



188 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ably thinking him a milksop who would not resent 
an affront. But the latent courage of Mary's hus- 
band instantly blazed up, and he challenged the 
insulter to a duel. Although Mary thought her 
husband was brave enough to fight anybody, she 
thought that perhaps, in some ways, he was a milk- 
sop and did not understand the use of arms nearly 
as well as she did. Therefore, she made him stay 
on board the ship while she went to a little island 
near where they were anchored and fought the duel 
with sword and pistol. The man pirate and the 
woman pirate now went savagely to work, and it 
was not long before the man pirate lay dead upon 
the sand, while Mary returned to an admiring crew 
and a grateful husband. 

During her piratical career Mary fell in with 
another woman pirate, Anne Bonny, by name, and 
these women, being perhaps the only two of their 
kind, became close friends. Anne came of a good 
family. She was the daughter of an Irish lawyer, 
who went to Carolina and became a planter, and 
there the little girl grew up. When her mother 
died she kept the house, but her disposition was 
very much more masculine than feminine. She 



THE STORY OF TWO WOMEN PIRATES 189 

was" very quick-tempered and easily enraged, and 
it is told of her that when an Englishwoman, who 
was working as a servant in her father's house, had 
irritated Anne by some carelessness or imper- 
tinence, that hot-tempered young woman sprang 
upon her and stabbed her with a carving-knife. 
It is not surprising that Anne soon showed a 
dislike for the humdrum life on a plantation, and 
meeting with a young sailor, who owned nothing 
in the world but the becoming clothes he wore, she 
married him. Thereupon her father, who seems 
to have been as hot-headed as his daughter, 
promptly turned her out of doors. The fiery Anne 
was glad enough to adopt her husband's life, and 
she went to sea with him, sailing to New Provi- 
dence. There she was thrown into an entirely 
new circle of society. Pirates were in the habit of 
congregating at this place, and Anne was greatly 
delighted with the company of these daring, dash- 
ing sea-robbers, of whose exploits she had so often 
heard. The more she associated with the pirates, 
the less she cared for the plain, stupid sailors, who 
were content with the merchant service, and she 
finally deserted her husband and married a 



190 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Captain Rackham, one of the most attractive and 
dashing pirates of the day. 

Anne went on board the ship of her pirate hus- 
band, and as she was sure his profession would 
exactly suit her wild and impetuous nature, she 
determined also to become a pirate. She put on 
man's clothes, girded to her side a cutlass, and 
hung pistols in her belt. During many voyages 
Anne sailed with Captain Rackham, and wherever 
there was pirate's work to do, she was on deck to 
do it. At last the gallant captain came to grief. 
He was captured and condemned to death. Now 
there was an opportunity for Anne's nature to 
assert itself, and it did, but it was a very different 
sort of nature from that of Mary Reed. Just 
before his execution Anne was admitted to see her 
husband, but instead of offering to do anything 
that might comfort him or palliate his dreadful 
misfortune, she simply stood and contemptuously 
glared at him. She was sorry, she said, to see him 
in such a predicament, but she told him plainly 
that if he had had the courage to fight like a man, 
he would not then be waiting to be hung like a dog, 
and with that she walked away and left him. 



THE STORY OF TWO WOMEN PIRATES 191 

On the occasion when Captain Rackham had 
been captured, Mary Reed and her husband were 
on board his ship, and there was, perhaps, some 
reason for Anne's denunciation of the cowardice 
of Captain Rackham. As has been said, the two 
women were good friends and great fighters, and 
when they found the vessel engaged in a fight with 
a man-of-war, they stood together upon the deck 
and boldly fought, although the rest of the crew, 
and even the captain himself, were so discouraged 
by the heavy fire which was brought to bear on 
them, that they had retreated to the hold. 

Mary and Anne were so disgusted at this exhibi- 
tion of cowardice, that they rushed to the hatch- 
ways and shouted to their dastardly companions to 
come up and help defend the ship, and when their 
entreaties were disregarded, they were so enraged 
that they fired down into the hold, killing one of 
the frightened pirates and wounding several others. 
But their ship was taken, and Mary and Anne, in 
company with all the pirates who had been left 
alive, were put in irons and carried to England. 

When she was in prison, Mary declared that she 
and her husband had firmly intended to give up 



192 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

piracy and become private citizens. But when she 
was put on trial, the accounts of her deeds had 
a great deal more effect than her words upon her 
judges, and she was condemned to be executed. 
She was saved, however, from this fate by a fever 
of which she died soon after her conviction. 

The impetuous Anne was also condemned, but 
the course of justice is often very curious and diffi- 
cult to understand, and this hard-hearted and san- 
guinary woman was reprieved and finally par- 
doned. Whether or not she continued to disport 
herself as a man we do not know, but it is certain 
that she was the last of the female pirates. 

There are a great many things which women can 
do as well as men, and there are many professions 
and lines of work from which they have been long 
debarred, and for which they are most admirably 
adapted, but it seems to me that piracy is not one 
of them. It is said that a woman's nature is apt to 
carry her too far, and I have never heard of any 
man pirate who would allow himself to become so 
enraged against the cowardice of his companions 
that he would deliberately fire down into the hold 
of a vessel containing his wife and a crowd of his 
former associates. 



CHAPTER XVII 
The Pirate of the Buried Treasure 

AMONG all the pirates who have figured in 
history, legend, or song, there is one whose 
name stands preeminent 1 as the typical 
hero of the dreaded black flag. The name of this 
man will instantly rise in the mind of almost every 
reader, for when we speak of pirates, we always 
think of Captain Kidd. 

In fact, however, Captain Kidd was not a typical 
pirate, for in many ways he was different from the 
ordinary marine freebooter, especially when we 
consider him in relation to our own country. All 
other pirates who made themselves notorious on 
our coast were known as robbers, pillagers, and 
ruthless destroyers of life and property, but Cap- 
tain Kidd's fame was of another kind. We do 
not think of him as a pirate who came to carry 
away the property of American citizens, for nearly 

1 Preeminent, very prominent, before all others, 
o 193 



194 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

all the stories about him relate to his arrival at 
different points on our shores for the sole purpose 
of burying and concealing the rich treasures which 
he had* collected in other parts of the world. 

This novel reputation given a pirate who 
enriched oar share by his deposits and took away 
none of the possessions of our people could not fail 
to make Captain Kidd a most interesting person- 
age, and the result has been that he has been lifted 
out of the sphere of ordinary history and descrip- 
tion into the region of imagination and legen- 
dary romance. In a word, he has been made a 
hero of fiction and song. It may be, well, then, to 
assume that there are two Captain Kidds, — one 
the Kidd of legend and story, and the other the 
Kidd of actual fact, and we will consider, one at a 
time, the two characters in which we know the 
man. 

As has been said before, nearly all the stories of 
the legendary Captain Kidd relate to his visits 
along our northern coast, and even to inland 
points, for the purpose of concealing the treasures 
which had been amassed in other parts of the 
world. 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 195 

Thus if we were to find ourselves in almost any 
village or rural settlement along the coast of New 
Jersey or Long Island, and were to fall in with any 
old resident who was fond of talking to strangers, 
he would probably point out to us the blackened 
and weather-beaten ribs of a great ship which had 
been wrecked on the sand-bar off the coast during 
a terrible storm long ago ; he would show us where 
the bathing was pleasant and safe ; he would tell 
us of the best place for fishing, and probably show 
us the high bluff a little back from the beach from 
which the Indian maiden leaped to escape the 
tomahawk of her enraged lover, and then he would 
be almost sure to tell us of the secluded spot where 
it was said Captain Kidd and his pirates once 
buried a lot of treasure. 

If we should ask our garrulous * guide why this 
treasure had not been dug up by the people of 
the place, he would probably shake his head and 
declare that personally he knew nothing about it, 
but that it was generally believed that it was there, 
and he had heard that there had been people 
who had tried to find it, but if they did find any, 

1 Garrulous, talkative. 



196 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

they never said anything about it, and it was his 
opinion that if Captain Kidd ever put any gold 
or silver or precious stones under the ground on 
that part of the coast, these treasures were all 
there yet. 

Further questioning would probably develop the 
fact that there was a certain superstition which pre- 
vented a great many people from interfering with 
the possible deposits which Captain Kidd had 
made in their neighborhood, and although few 
persons would be alple to define exactly the founda- 
tion of the superstition, it was generally supposed 
that most of the pirates' treasures were guarded by 
pirate ghosts. In that case, of course, timid indi- 
viduals would be deterred from going out by them- 
selves at night, — for that was the proper time to 
dig for buried treasure, — and as it would not have 
been easy to get together a number of men each 
brave enough to give the others courage, many of 
the spots reputed to be the repositories of buried 
treasure have never been disturbed. 

In spite of the fear of ghosts, in spite of the 
want of accurate knowledge in regard to favored 
localities, in spite of hardships, previous disap- 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 197 

pointments, or expected ridicule, a great many 
extensive excavations have been made in the sands 
or the soil along the coasts of our northern states, 
and even in quiet woods lying miles from the sea, 
to which it would have been necessary for the 
pirates to carry their goods in wagons, people 
have dug and hoped and have gone away sadly 
to attend to more sensible business, and far up 
some of our rivers — where a pirate vessel never 
floated — people have dug with the same hopeful 
anxiety, and have stopped digging in the same 
condition of dejected disappointment. 

Sometimes these enterprises were conducted on 
a scale which reminds us of the operations on the 
gold coast of California. Companies were organ- 
ized, stock was issued and subscribed for, and the 
excavations were conducted under the direction of 
skilful treasure-seeking engineers. 

It is said that not long ago a company was organ- 
ized in Nova Scotia for the purpose of seeking for 
Captain Kidd's treasures in a place which it is 
highly probable Captain Kidd never saw. A 
great excavation having been made, the water 
from the sea came in and filled it up, but the work 



198 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

was stopped only long enough to procure steam 
pumps with which the big hole could be drained. 
At last accounts the treasures had not been reached, 
and this incident is mentioned only to show how 
this belief in buried treasures continues even to the 
present day. 

There is a legend which differs somewhat from 
the ordinary run of these stories, and it is told 
about a little island on the coast of Cape Cod, 
which is called Hannah Screecher's Island, and 
this is the way its name came to it. 

Captain Kidd, while sailing along the coast, look- 
ing for a suitable place to bury some treasure, 
found this island adapted to his purpose, and 
landed there with his savage crew, and his bags and 
boxes, and his gold and precious stones. It was 
said to be the habit of these pirates, whenever they 
made a deposit on the coast, to make the hole big 
enough not only to hold the treasure they wished 
to deposit there, but the body of one of the crew, 
— who was buried with the valuables in order that 
his spirit might act as a day and night watchman 
to frighten away people who might happen to be 
digging in that particular spot. 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 199 

The story relates that somewhere on the coast 
Captain Kidd had captured a young lady named 
Hannah, and not knowing what to do with her, and 
desiring not to commit an unnecessary extrava- 
gance by disposing of a useful sailor, he deter- 
mined to kill Hannah, and bury her with the treas- 
ure, in order that she might keep away intruders 
until he came for it. 

It was very natural that when Hannah was 
brought on shore and found out what was going to 
be done with her, she should screech in a most 
dreadful manner, and although the pirates soon 
silenced her and covered her up, they did not 
succeed in silencing her spirit, and ever since that 
time, — according to the stories told by some of 
the older inhabitants of Cape Cod, — there may be 
heard in the early dusk of the evening the screeches 
of Hannah coming across the water from her little 
island to the mainland. 

But the ordinary Kidd stories are very much the 
same, and depend a good deal upon the character 
of the coast and upon the imagination of the people 
who live in that region. We will give one of them 
as a sample, and from this a number of very good 



200 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

pirate stories could be manufactured by ingenious 
persons. 

It was a fine summer night late in the seven- 
teenth century. A young man named Abner 
Stout, in company 'with his wife Mary, went out 
for a walk upon the beach. They lived in a little 
village near the coast of New Jersey. Abner 
was a good carpenter, but a poor man ; but he 
and his wife were very happy with each other, 
and as they walked toward the sea in the light of 
the full moon, no young lovers could have been 
more gay. 

When they reached a little bluff covered with 
low shrubbery, which was the first spot from which 
they could have a full view of the ocean, Abner 
suddenly stopped, and pointed out to Mary an 
unusual sight. There, as plainly in view as if it 
had been broad daylight, was a vessel lying at the 
entrance of the little bay. The sails were furled, 
and it was apparently anchored. 

For a minute Abner gazed in utter amazement 
at the sight of this vessel, for no ships, large or 
small, came to this little lonely bay. There was a 
harbor two or three miles farther up the coast to 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 201 

which all trading craft repaired. What could the 
strange ship want here ? 

This unusual visitor to the little bay was a very 
low and very long, black schooner, with tall masts 
which raked forward, and with something which 
looked very much like a black flag fluttering in its 
rigging. Now the truth struck into the soul of 
Abner. "Hide yourself, Mary," he whispered. 
"It is a pirate ship !" And almost at the same 
instant the young man and his wife laid themselves 
flat on the ground among the bushes, but they were 
very careful, each of them, to take a position which 
would allow them to peep out through the twigs 
and leaves upon the scene before them. 

There seemed to be a good deal of commotion 
on board the black schooner, and very soon a large 
boat pushed off from her side, and the men in it 
began rowing rapidly toward the shore, apparently 
making for a spot on the beach, not far from the 
bluff on which Abner and Mary were concealed. 
"Let us get up and run," whispered Mary, trem- 
bling from head to toe. "They are pirates, and 
they are coming here !" 

" Lie still ! Lie still ! " said Abner. " If we get 



202 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

up and leave these bushes, we shall be seen, and 
then they will be after us ! Lie still, and do not 
move a finger !" 

The trembling Mary obeyed her husband, and 
they both lay quite still, scarcely breathing, with 
eyes wide open. The boat rapidly approached 
the shore. Abner counted ten men rowing and 
one man sitting in the stern. The boat seemed to 
be heavily loaded, and the oarsmen rowed hard. 

Now the boat was run through the surf to the 
beach, and its eleven occupants jumped out. 
There was no mistaking their character. They 
were true pirates. They had great cutlasses and 
pistols, and one of them was very tall and broad 
shouldered, and wore an old-fashioned cocked hat. 

"That's Captain Kidd," whispered Abner to his 
wife, and she pressed his hand to let him know that 
she thought he must be right. 

Now the men came up high upon the beach, and 
began looking about here and there as if they were 
searching for something. Mary was filled with 
horror for fear they should come to that bluff to 
search, but Abner knew there was no danger of 
that. They had probably come to those shores 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 203 

to bury treasure, as if they were great sea-turtles 
coming up upon the beach to lay their eggs, and 
they were now looking for some good spot where 
they might dig. 

Presently the tall man gave some orders in a low 
voice, and then his men left him to himself, and 
went back to the boat. There was a great pine 
tree standing back a considerable distance from 
the water, battered and racked by storms, but still 
a tough old tree. Toward this the pirate captain 
stalked, and standing close to it, with his back 
against it, he looked up into the sky. It was plain 
that he was looking for a star. There were very 
few of these luminaries to be seen in the heavens, 
for the moon was so bright. But as Abner looked 
in the direction in which the pirate captain gazed, 
he saw a star still bright in spite of the moonlight. 

With his eyes fixed upon this star, the pirate 
captain now stepped forward, making long strides. 
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Then he 
stopped, plunged his right heel in the soft ground, 
and turned squarely about to the left, so that his 
broad back was now parallel with a line drawn from 
the pine tree to the star. 



204 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

At right angles to this line the pirate now stepped 
forward, making as before seven long paces. Then 
he stopped, dug his heel into the ground, and beck- 
oned to his men. Up they came running, carry- 
ing picks and spades, and with great alacrity they 
began to dig at the place the captain had marked 
with his heel. 

It was plain that these pirates were used to mak- 
ing excavations, for it was not long before the hole 
was so deep that those within it could not be 
seen. Then the captain gave an order to cease 
digging, and he and all the pirates went back to 
the boat. 

For about half an hour, — though Mary thought 
it was a longer time than that, — those pirates 
worked very hard carrying great boxes and bags 
from the boat to the excavation. When every- 
thing had been brought up, two of the pirates 
went down into the hole, and the others handed to 
them the various packages. Skilfully and quickly 
they worked, doubtless storing their goods with 
great care, until nearly everything which had 
been brought from the boat had been placed in the 
deep hole. Some rolls of goods were left upon the 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 205 




TWO OF THE PlKATES WENT DOWN INTO THE HOLE. 



206 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

ground which Mary thought were carpets, but 
which Abner believed to be rich Persian rugs, of 
something of that kind. 

Now the captain stepped aside, and picking up 
from the sand some little sticks and reeds, he 
selected ten of them, and with these in one hand, 
and with their ends protruding a short distance 
above his closed fingers, he rejoined his men. 
They gathered before him, and he held out toward 
them the hand which contained the little sticks. 

"They're drawing lots!" gasped Abner, and 
Mary trembled more than she had done yet. 

Now the lots were all drawn, and one man, appar- 
ently a young pirate, stepped out from among his 
fellows. His head was bowed, and his arms were 
folded across his manly chest. The captain spoke 
a few words, and the young pirate advanced alone 
to the side of the deep hole. 

Mary now shut her eyes tight, tight ; but Abner's 
were wide open. There was a sudden gleam of cut- 
lasses in the air; there was one short, plaintive 
groan, and the body of the young pirate fell into 
the hole. Instantly all the other goods, furs, rugs, 
or whatever they were, were tumbled in upon him. 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 207 

Then the men began to shovel in the earth and 
sand, and in an incredibly short time the hole was 
filled up even with the ground about it. 

Of course all the earth and sand which had been 
taken out of the hole could not now be put back 
into it. But these experienced treasure-hiders 
knew exactly what to do with it. A spadeful at a 
time, the soil which could not be replaced was 
carried to the sea, and thrown out into the water, 
and when the whole place had been carefully 
smoothed over, the pirates gathered sticks and 
stones, and little bushes, and great masses of wild 
cranberry vines and scattered them about over 
the place so that it soon looked exactly like the 
rest of the beach about it. 

Then the tall captain gave another low command, 
the pirates returned to their boat, it was pushed off, 
and rapidly rowed back to the schooner. Up came 
the anchor, up went the dark sails. The low, 
black schooner was put about, and very soon she 
was disappearing over the darkening waters, her 
black flag fluttering fiercely high above her. 

"Now, let us run," whispered poor Mary, who, 
although she had not seen everything, imagined a 



208 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

great deal; for as the pirates were getting into 
their boat she had opened her eyes and had 
counted them, and there were only nine besides the 
tall captain. 

Abner thought that her advice was very good, 
and starting up out of the brushwood they 
hastened home as fast as their legs would carry 
them. 

The next day Abner seemed to be a changed 
man. He had work to do, but he neglected it. 
Never had such a thing happened before ! For 
hours he sat in front of the house, looking up into 
the sky, counting one, two, three, four, five, six, 
seven. Then he would twist himself around on 
the little bench, and count seven more. 

This worthy couple lived in a small house which 
had a large cellar, and during the afternoon of that 
day Abner busied himself in clearing out this cellar, 
and taking out of it everything which it had con- 
tained. His wife asked no questions. In her 
soul she knew what Abner was thinking about. 

Supper was over, and most of the people in the 
village were thinking of going to bed, when Abner 
said to Mary : "Let us each take a spade, and I 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 209 

will carry a pail, and we will go out upon the beach 
for' a walk. If any one should see us, they would 
think that we were going to dig for clams." 

" Oh, no, dear Abner ! " cried Mary. " We must 
not dig there ! Think of that young pirate. 
Almost the first thing we would come to would be 
him!" 

"I have thought of that," said Abner ; "but do 
you not believe that the most Christian act that 
you and I could do would be to take him out and 
place him in a proper grave near by ?" 

"Oh, no !" exclaimed Mary, "do not say such 
a thing as that ! Think of his ghost ! They killed 
him and put him there, that his ghost might guard 
their treasure. You know, Abner, as well as I do, 
that this is their dreadful fashion !" 

"I know all about that," said Abner, "and that 
is the reason I wish to go to-night. I do not 
believe there has yet been time enough for his 
ghost to form. But let us take him out now, dear 
Mary, and lay him reverently away, — r and then !" 
He looked at her with flashing eyes. 

"But, Abner," said she, "do you think we have 
the right?" 



210 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

"Of course we have," said he. "Those treas- 
ures do not belong to the pirates. If we take 
them, they are treasure-trove, and legally ours. 
And think, dear Mary, how poor we are to-night 
and how rich we may be to-morrow ! Come, get 
the pail. We must be off." 

Running nearly all the way, — for they, were in 
such a hurry they could not walk, — Abner and 
Mary soon reached the bluff, and hastily scram- 
bling down to the beach below, they stood upon the 
dreadful spot where Captain Kidd and his pirates 
had stood the night before. There was the old 
battered pine tree, reaching out two of its bare 
arms encouragingly toward them. 

Without loss of time Abner walked up to the 
tree, put his back to it, and then looked up into 
the sky. Now he called Mary to him. "Which 
star do you think he looked at, good wife?" said 
he. "There is a bright one low down, and then 
there is another one a little higher up, and farther 
to the right, but it is fainter." 

"It would be the bright one, I think," said 
Mary. And then Abner, his eyes fixed upon the 
bright star, commenced to stride. One, two, three, 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 211 

four, five, six, seven. Turning squarely around to 
the left he again made seven paces. And now he 
beckoned vigorously to Mary to come and dig. 

For about ten minutes they dug, and then they 
laid bare a great mass of rock. "This isn't the 
place," cried Abner. " I must begin again. I did 
not look at the right star. I will take the other 
one." 

For the greater part of that night Abner and 
Mary remained upon the beach. Abner would 
put his back against the tree, fix his eyes upon 
another star, stride forward seven paces, and then 
seven to the left, and he would come upon a little 
scrubby pine tree. Of course that was not the 
place. 

The moon soon began to set, and more stars 
came out, so that Abner had a greater choice. 
Again and again he made his measurements, and 
every time that he came to the end of his second 
seven paces, he found that it would have been im- 
possible for the pirates to make their excavation 
there. 

There was clearly something wrong. Abner 
thought that he had not selected the right star, and 



212 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Mary thought that his legs were not long enough. 
"That pirate captain/' quoth she, "had a long and 
manly stride. Seven of his paces would go a far 
greater distance than seven of yours, Abner." 

Abner made his paces a little longer; but al- 
though he and his wife kept up their work until 
they could see the early dawn, they found no spot 
where it would be worth while to dig, and so mourn- 
fully they returned to their home and their empty 
cellar. 

As long as the moonlight lasted, Abner and Mary 
went to the little beach at the head of the bay, 
and made their measurements and their searches, 
but although they sometimes dug a little here and 
there, they always found that they had not struck 
the place where the pirate's treasure had been 
buried. 

When at last they gave up their search, and con- 
cluded to put their household goods back into their 
cellar, they told the tale to some of the neighbors, 
and other people went out and dug, not only at the 
place which had been designated, but miles up and 
down the coast, and then the story was told and 
retold, and so it has lasted until the present day. 



PIRATE OF THE BURIED TREASURE 213 

What has been said about the legendary Captain 
Kidd will give a very good idea of the estimation in 
which this romantic being has been, and still is, 
held in various parts of the country, and, of all the 
legitimate legends about him, there is not one 
which recounts his piratical deeds upon our coast. 
The reason for this will be seen when we consider, 
in the next chapter, the life and character of the 
real Captain Kidd. 



CHAPTER XVIII 
The Real Captain Kidd 

WILLIAM KIDD, or Robert Kidd, as he 
is sometimes called, was a sailor in the 
merchant service who had a wife and 
family in New York. He was a very respectable 
man and had a good reputation as a seaman, and 
about 1690, when there was war between England 
and France, Kidd was given the command of a 
privateer, and having had two or three engage- 
ments with French vessels he showed himself to be 
a brave fighter and a prudent commander. 

Some years later he sailed to England, and, while 
there, he received an appointment of a peculiar 
character. It was at the time when the King of 
England was doing his best to put down the pirates 
of the American coast, and Sir George Bellomont, 
the recently appointed Governor of New York, rec- 
ommended Captain Kidd as a very suitable man 
to command a ship to be sent out to suppress 

214 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 215 

piracy. When Kidd agreed to take the position 
of chief of marine police, he was not employed by 
the Crown, but by a small company of gentlemen 
of capital, who formed themselves into a sort of 
trust company, or society for the prevention of 
cruelty to merchantmen, and the object of their 
association was not only to put down pirates, but 
to put some money in their own pockets as well. 

Kidd was furnished with two commissions, one 
appointing him a privateer with authority to cap- 
ture French vessels, and the other empowering 
him to seize and destroy all pirate ships. Kidd 
was ordered in his mission to keep a strict account 
of all booty captured, in order that it might be 
fairly divided among those who were stockholders 
in the enterprise, one-tenth of the total proceeds 
being reserved for the King. 

Kidd sailed from England in the Adventure, a 
large ship with thirty guns and eighty men, and 
on his way to America he captured a French ship 
which he carried to New York. Here he arranged 
to make his crew a great deal larger than had been 
thought necessary in England, and, by offering a 
fair share of the property he might confiscate on 



216 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

piratical or French ships, he induced a great many 
able seamen to enter his service, and when the 
Adventure left New York, she carried a crew of one 
hundred and fifty-five men. 

With a fine ship and a strong crew, Kidd now 
sailed out of the harbor with the ostensible * pur- 
pose of putting down piracy in American waters, 
but the methods of this legally appointed marine 
policeman were very peculiar, and, instead of 
cruising up and down our coast, he gayly sailed 
away to the island of Madiera, 2 and then around 
the Cape of Good Hope to Madagascar and the 
Red Sea, thus getting himself as far out of his 
regular beat as any New York constable would 
have been had he undertaken to patrol the 
dominions of the Khan of Tartary. 

By the time Captain Kidd reached that part of 
the world he had been at sea for nearly a year 
without putting down any pirates or capturing 
any French ships. In fact, he had made no money 
whatever for himself or the stockholders of the 
company which had sent him out. His men, of 
course, must have been much surprised at this 

1 Ostensible, apparent. 2 Madiera. See map.* 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 217 

unusual neglect of his own and his employers' 
interests, but when he reached the Red Sea, he 
boldly informed them that he had made a change 
in his business, and had decided that he would be 
no longer a suppressor of piracy, but would become 
a pirate himself ; and, instead of taking prizes of 
French ships only, — which he was legally empow- 
ered to do, — he would try to capture any val- 
uable ship he could find on the seas, no matter 
to what nation it belonged. He then went on 
to state that his present purpose in coming into 
those oriental waters was to capture the rich 
fleet from Mocha which was due in the lower part 
of the Red Sea about that time. 

The crew of the Adventure, who must have been 
tired of having very little to do and making no 
money, expressed their entire approbation of their 
captain's change of purpose, and readily agreed 
to become pirates. 

Kidd waited a good while for the Mocha fleet, 
but it did not arrive, and then he made his first 
venture in actual piracy. He overhauled a 
Moorish vessel which was commanded by an 
English captain, and as England was not at war 



218 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

with Morocco, and as the nationality of the ship's 
commander should have protected him, Kidd thus 
boldly broke the marine laws which governed the 
civilized world and stamped himself an out-and- 
out pirate. After the exercise of considerable 
cruelty he extorted from his first prize a small 
amount of money ; and although he and his men 
did not gain very much booty, they had whetted 
their appetites for more, and Kidd cruised savagely 
over the eastern seas in search of other spoils. 

After a time the Adventure fell in with a fine 
English ship, called the Royal Captain, and 
although she was probably laden with a rich 
cargo, Kidd did not attack her. His piratical 
character was not yet sufficiently formed to give 
him the disloyal audacity which would enable 
him with his English ship and his English crew, to 
fall upon another English ship manned by another 
English crew. In time his heart might be hard- 
ened, but he felt that he could not begin with 
this sort of thing just yet. So the Adventure 
saluted the Royal Captain with ceremonious 
politeness, and each vessel passed quietly on its 
way. But this conscientious consideration did 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 219 

not suit Kidd's crew. They had already had a 
taste of booty, and they were hungry for more, 
and when the fine English vessel, of which they 
might so easily have made a prize, was allowed to 
escape them, they were loud in their complaints 
and grumblings. 

One of the men, a gunner, named William 
Moore, became actually impertinent upon the sub- 
ject, and he and Captain Kidd had a violent 
quarrel, in the course of which the captain picked 
up a heavy iron-bound bucket and struck the dis- 
satisfied gunner on the head with it. The blow 
was such a powerful one that the man's skull was 
broken, and he died the next day. 

Captain Kidd's conscience seems to have been a 
good deal in his way; for although he had been 
sailing about in various eastern waters, taking 
prizes wherever he could, he was anxious that 
reports of his misdeeds should not get home before 
him. Having captured a fine vessel bound west- 
ward, he took from her all the booty he could, 
and then proceeded to arrange matters so that the 
capture of this ship should appear to be a legal 
transaction. The ship was manned by Moors and 



220 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

commanded by a Dutchman, and of course Kidd 
had no right to touch it, but the sharp-witted and 
business-like pirate selected one of the passengers 
and made him sign a paper declaring that he was a 
Frenchman, and that he commanded the ship. 
When this statement had been sworn to before 
witnesses, Kidd put the document in his pocket so 
that if he were called upon to explain the trans- 
action, he might be able to show that he had good 
reason to suppose that he had captured a French 
ship, which, of course, was all right and proper. 
Kidd now ravaged the East India waters with 
great success and profit, and at last he fell in with 
a very fine ship from Armenia, called the Quedagh 
Merchant, commanded by an Englishman. Kidd's 
conscience had been growing harder and harder 
every day, and he did not now hesitate to attack 
any vessel. The great merchantman was cap- 
tured, and proved to be one of the most valuable 
prizes ever taken by a pirate, for Kidd's own 
share of the spoils amounted to more than sixty 
thousand dollars. This was such a grand haul 
that Kidd lost no time in taking his prize 
to some place where he might safely dispose of 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 



221 




The Great Merchantman was captured. " 



222 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

her cargo, and get rid of her passengers. Accord- 
ingly he sailed for Madagascar. While he was 
there he fell in with the first pirate vessel he had 
met since he had started out to put down piracy. 
This was a ship commanded by an English pirate 
named Culliford, and here would have been a 
chance for Captain Kidd to show that, although 
he might transgress the law himself, he would 
be true to his engagement not to allow other people 
to do so ; but he had given up putting down piracy, 
and instead of apprehending Culliford he went into 
partnership with him, and the two agreed to go 
pirating together. 

This partnership, however, did not continue 
long, for Captain Kidd began to believe that it 
was time for him to return to his native country 
and make a report of his proceedings to his em- 
ployers. Having confined his piratical proceed- 
ings to distant parts of the world, he hoped that 
he would be able to make Sir George Bellomont 
and the other stockholders suppose that his 
booty was all legitimately taken from French 
vessels cruising in the east, and when the proper 
division should be made he would be able to 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 223 

quietly enjoy his portion of the treasure he had 
gained. 

He did not go back in the Adventure, which was 
probably not large enough to carry all the booty 
he had amassed, 1 but putting everything on 
board his latest prize, the Quedagh Merchant, he 
burned his old ship and sailed homeward. 

When he reached the West Indies, however, 
our wary sea-robber was very much surprised to 
find that accounts of his evil deeds had reached 
America, and that the colonial authorities had 
been so much incensed by the news that the man 
who had been sent out to suppress piracy had 
become himself a pirate, that they had circulated 
notices throughout the different colonies, urging 
the arrest of Kidd if he should come into any 
American port. This was disheartening intel- 
ligence for the treasure-laden Captain Kidd, but 
he did not despair; he knew that the love of 
money was often strong in the minds of human 
beings as the love of justice. Sir George Bello- 
mont, who was now in New York, was one of the 
principal stockholders in the enterprise, and 

1 Amassed, gathered together. 



224 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

Kidd hoped that the rich share of the results of 
his industry which would come to the Governor 
might cause unpleasant reports to be disregarded. 
In this case he might yet return to his wife and 
family with a neat little fortune, and without danger 
of being called upon to explain his exceptional 
performances in the eastern seas. 

Of course Kidd was not so foolish and rash as to 
sail into New York harbor on board the Quedagh 
Merchant, so he bought a small sloop and put the 
most valuable portion of his goods on board her, 
leaving his larger vessel, which also contained a 
great quantity of merchandise, in the charge of one 
of his confederates, while in the little sloop he 
cautiously approached the coast of New Jersey. 
His great desire was to find out what sort of a 
reception he might expect, so he entered Delaware 
Bay. When he stopped at a little seaport in 
order to take in some supplies, he discovered that 
there was but small chance of his visiting his 
home and his family, and of making a report to 
his superior in the character of a deserving mari- 
ner who had returned after a successful voyage. 
Some people in the village recognized him, and the 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 225 

report soon spread to New York that the pirate 
Kidd was lurking about the coast. A sloop of 
war was sent out to capture his vessel, and finding 
that it was impossible to remain in the vicinity 
where he had been discovered, Kidd sailed north- 
ward and entered Long Island Sound. 

Here the shrewd and anxious pirate began to 
act the part of the watch dog who has been killing 
sheep. In every way he endeavored to assume 
the appearance of innocence and to conceal every 
sign of misbehavior. He wrote to Sir George 
Bellomont that he should have called upon him 
in order to report his proceedings and hand over 
his profits, were it not for the wicked and mali- 
cious reports that had been circulated about him. 

It was during this period of suspense, when the 
returned pirate did not know what was likely to 
happen, that it is supposed, by the believers in the 
hidden treasures of Kidd, that he buried his coin 
and bullion and his jewels, some in one place and 
some in another, so that if he were captured his 
riches would not be taken with him. Among the 
wild stories which were believed at that time, and 
for long years after, was one to the effect that Cap- 



226 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

tain Kidd's ship was chased up the Hudson River 
by a man-of-war, and that the pirates, finding they 
could not get away, sank their ship and fled to the 
shore with all the gold and silver they could carry, 
which they afterwards buried at the foot of 
Dunderbergh Mountain. A great deal of rocky 
soil has been turned over at different times in 
search of these treasures, but no discoveries of 
hidden coin have yet been reported. The fact is, 
however, that during this time of anxious waiting 
Kidd never sailed west of Oyster Bay in Long 
Island. He was afraid to approach New York, 
although he had frequent communication with that 
city, and was joined by his wife and family. 

About this time occurred an incident which has 
given rise to all the stories regarding the buried 
treasure of Captain Kidd. The disturbed and 
anxious pirate concluded that it was a danger- 
ous thing to keep so much valuable treasure on 
board his vessel which might at any time be over- 
hauled by the authorities, and he therefore landed 
at Gardiner's Island on the Long Island coast, 
and obtained permission from the proprietor to 
bury some of his superfluous stores upon his 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 227 




Pirates dividing the Spoil 



228 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

estate. This was a straightforward transaction. 
Mr. Gardiner knew all about the burial of the 
treasure, and when it was afterwards proved that 
Kidd was really a pirate, the hidden booty was all 
given up to the government. 

This appears to be the only case in which it was 
positively known that Kidd buried treasure on our 
coast, and it has given rise to all the stories of the 
kind which have ever been told. 

For some weeks Kidd's sloop remained in Long 
Island Sound, and then he took courage and went 
to Boston to see some influential people there. 
He was allowed to go freely about the city for a 
week, and then he was arrested. 

The rest of Kidd's story is soon told ; he was 
sent to England for trial, and there he was con- 
demned to death, not only for the piracies he had 
committed, but also for the murder of William 
Moore. He was executed, and his body was hung 
in chains on the banks of the Thames, where for 
years it dangled in the wind, a warning to all 
evil-minded sailors. 

About the time of Kidd's trial and execution a 
ballad was written which had a wide circulation 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 229 

in England and America. It was set to music, 
and for many years helped to spread the fame of 
this pirate. The ballad was a very long one, con- 
taining nearly twenty-six verses, and some of 
them run as follows : — 

My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, when I 
sailed, 
My name was Robert Kidd, when I sailed, 
My name was Robert Kidd, 
God's laws I did forbid, 
And so wickedly I did, when I sailed. 

I spyed the ships from France, as I sailed, as I sailed, 
I spyed the ships from France, as I sailed, 
I spyed the ships from France, 
To them I did advance, 
And took them all by chance, as I sailed. 

I spyed the ships of Spain, as I sailed, as I sailed, 
I spyed the ships of Spain, as I sailed, 
I spyed the ships of Spain, 
I fired on them amain, 
'Till most of them was slain, as I sailed. 

I'd ninety bars of gold, as I sailed, as I sailed, 
I'd ninety bars of gold, as I sailed, 
I'd ninety bars of gold, 
And dollars manifold, 
With riches uncontrolled, as I sailed. 



230 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

It is said that Kidd showed no repentance when 
he was tried, but insisted that he was the victim of 
malicious persons who swore falsely against him. 
And yet a more thoroughly dishonest rascal never 
sailed under the black flag. In the guise of an ac- 
credited officer of the government, he committed 
the crimes he was sent out to suppress ; he deceived 
his men ; he robbed and misused his fellow-coun- 
trymen and his friends, and he even descended to 
the meanness of cheating and despoiling the natives 
of the West India Islands, with whom he traded. 
These people were in the habit of supplying pirates 
with food and other necessaries, and they always 
found their rough customers entirely honest, and 
willing to pay for what they received ; for as the 
pirates made a practice of stopping at certain 
points for supplies, they wished, of course, to be on 
good terms with those who furnished them. But 
Kidd had no ideas of honor toward people of high 
or low degree. He would trade with the natives as 
if he intended to treat them fairly and pay for all 
he got ; but when the time came for him to depart, 
and he was ready to weigh anchor, he would seize 
upon all the commodities he could lay his hands 



THE REAL CAPTAIN KIDD 231 

upon, and without paying a copper to the distressed 
and indignant Indians, he would gayly sail away, 
his black flag flaunting x derisively 2 in the wind. 

But although in reality Captain Kidd was no 
hero, he has been known for a century and more 
as the great American pirate, and his name has 
been representative of piracy ever since. Years 
after he had been hung, when people heard that a 
vessel with a black flag, or one which looked black 
in the distance, flying from its rigging had been 
seen, they forgot that the famous pirate was dead, 
and imagined that Captain Kidd was visiting their 
part of the coast in order that he might find a good 
place to bury some treasure which it was no longer 
safe for him to carry about. 

There were two great reasons for the fame of 
Captain Kidd. One of these was the fact that he 
had been sent out by important officers of the 
crown who expected to share the profits of his 
legitimate operations, but who were supposed by 
their enemies to be perfectly willing to take any 
sort of profits provided it could not be proved that 
they were the results of piracy, and who afterwards 

1 Flaunting, waving. 2 Derisively, making sport, ridiculing. 



232 STORIES OF THE SPANISH MAIN 

allowed Kidd to suffer for their sins as well as his own. 
These opinions introduced certain political features 
into his career and made him a very much talked-of 
man. The greater reason for his fame, how- 
ever, was the widespread belief in his buried treas- 
ures, and this made him the object of the most 
intense interest to hundreds of misguided people 
who hoped to be lucky enough to share his spoils. 
There were other pirates on the American coast 
during the eighteenth century, and some of them 
became very well known, but their stories are not 
uncommon, and we need not tell them here. As 
our country became better settled, and as well- 
armed revenue cutters began to cruise up and 
down our Atlantic coast for the protection of our 
commerce, pirates became fewer and fewer, and 
even those who were still bold enough to ply their 
trade grew milder in their manners, less daring in 
their exploits, and — more important than any- 
thing else — so unsuccessful in their illegal enter- 
prises that they were forced to admit that it was 
now more profitable to command or work a mer- 
chantman than endeavor to capture one, and so the 
sea-robbers of our coasts gradually passed away. 



